Salem’s Phillips House tells the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ story
By Taryn Plumb |
Globe Correspondent
June 14, 2012
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Stand in the center of the walk-through closet, and look to one side: A
bright dining room furnished with fine chairs and tables, wooden floors
covered with decorative rugs, a chandelier dangling above, and walls
inlaid with elegant molding.
Now glance to the other side: A kitchen with an enormous stove and
soapstone sink, worn brick floors, simple woodworking and fixtures. Dim
and utilitarian. No fancy flourishes.
The
two rooms in Salem’s Phillips House provide a tangible example of the
disparity between early 20th century families and their servants. Cooks,
maids, and housekeepers were meant to remain as shadowy, fleeting
figures who kept the house in order behind the scenes,
rarely seen and never heard.
Jennifer Pustz, of Historic New England, has dedicated herself to
bringing form to these silhouettes, to giving voices and stories to the
servants who so often remained anonymous. She has done extensive
research throughout Historic New England’s 36 properties, including at
the 1821 Phillips House on Salem’s Chestnut Street, unearthing the
artifacts of domestic American life.
“Bringing people out of the shadows creates a full story,” said Pustz, who wrote the 2010 book, “Voices from the Back Stairs."
In the case of the Phillips House, that story includes not only
owners Anna Phillips, her husband, Stephen Willard Phillips, and their
son, Stephen, but their first-floor maid, Delia Cawley, their cook,
Bridgit Durgin, and Caddy Shaughnessy, their nursemaid and attendant.
They also employed two part-time male staff: coachman, gardener, and
handyman Cornelius Flynn, and chauffeur Patrick O’Hara.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
The Phillips bought and renovated their home in 1911, and it stayed
in the family until the 1970s. The museum focuses on 1919 and 1920.
According to Pustz, the 11,500-square-foot,
three-story gray mansion with black shutters is particularly
interesting. Unlike other museum houses where servants quarters were
later cleared out, renovated, or turned into office or storage space,
its staff spaces have been relatively well-preserved.
In addition to its large soapstone sink, the kitchen still contains
the Walker and Pratt cooking stove, a wall of glass cabinets, and
gas-electric light fixtures.
Through a door at the back of the room and down a set of rugged
wooden stairs is the basement laundry room, with a long sink set with
wringers and washboards, a stove loaded up with irons, and a set kettle
used to boil clothes.
“It was a really messy, hot, sticky, long, job, and physically taxing,” Pustz said.
Going up from the kitchen is a long, narrow, rather ominous staircase
to the third-floor servants quarters. The three small bedrooms are
empty and unfurnished, but scratches on the floor and marks on the wall
tell of the life that was once there.
Back on the main floor, a china closet separates the kitchen from the
rest of the house, with its exquisitely furnished bedrooms, parlor,
library, and dining room.
Yet although the servants were very deliberately separated from all
this, they were never truly alone. As Pustz noted, theirs was a
24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week job.
“There was a constant amount of work,” she said.
A call-bell system installed by the Phillipses was common at the
time, but remains an uncommon artifact, as they were often removed from
historic houses during later-century renovations. Doorbell-like buttons
in nearly every room of the house were wired into boxes high on the wall
of the kitchen and on the third floor; when pressed, a loud bell would
ring and a flag would fill a round circle underneath room indicators,
such as the “library,” “parlor,” or “dining room.”
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Even though it meant the staff had to stop everything and attend to
the call, “it was an incredibly efficient way for them to work with the
family and meet their needs,” said site manager Julie Arrison.
Although the relationship the Phillips family had with their servants
was rather harmonious compared with other households, according to
Pustz, clearly defined barriers separated the two halves of the house.
For example, Arrison said, just what to call them was a “sticking
point” for the family — they were referred to as “the staff” or “the
girls,” rather than “servants.” Meanwhile, anecdotes — such as Mr.
Phillips’s propensity for stepping to the threshold of the kitchen, but
never going inside — stress just whose domain was whose, and who should
be where, and when.
On the other hand, although the servants heard and saw almost
everything that was going on, “they were expected to be invisible. It
was a very complicated visibility/invisibility,” said Pustz.
Ultimately, in exploring and presenting all that was found, the goal
is to create a “balanced perspective of what living here was like,” she
said. “It was two worlds under one roof.”
By telling all the stories of a house – or at least attempting to by
piecing together the scant bits of history — “it adds to the overall
narrative of New England’s history,” said Peter Gittleman, visitor
experience team leader for Historic New England. “Everyone’s history
matters.”
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
To that end, Historic New England also is unveiling a new, permanent
installation this month at the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in Newbury. It
looks at the Stekionis family, natives of Lithuania, who lived in a
tenant farmer house on the property from the 1920s to the 1990s, raising
food for the Littles.
Gittleman said it is just another example of the many narratives
beyond those of the “rich and famous” property owners to be discovered
in any given place.
“The stories are much more nuanced when you look at them from multiple perspectives,” he said.
Pustz agreed, stressing that, when analyzing history, people need to
be aware that there were “all kinds of layers and relationships,” and
there are also many things we’ll never know, no matter the amount of
digging into research.
Ultimately, she said, our shared past isn’t neat and linear, easily fitting into timelines and generalizations.
“History is a really messy, complicated thing,” she said.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
How does $5 a week sound? For circa 1919 servants in Salem, that was high pay
At the Phillips House circa 1919:
5
The number of servants employed by the Phillips family: 3 full-time women, 2 part-time men.
$5
The weekly wage of Delia Cawley, longtime maid for the Phillips family.
$3
Cawley’s weekly wage at her previous job.
100
Years (combined) that Cawley and maid/attendant Caddy Shaughnessy worked for the Phillips family.
SOURCE: Historic New England
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