Jonathan Corwin House, 310 Essex Street, Salem

Source document Quoted word for word from HABS MASS,5-SAL,13-. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

This project was an early survey began by the Historic American Buildings Survey during the The project was never completed. In HABS made the decision to transmit the unfinished materials from the to the Library of Congress due to the information potential of the documentation, and the fact that many of the unfinished drawings from this period document important historic properties, many of which are no longer extant. The name Witch House comes from Judge Corwin s involvement in the Salem witchcraft trails of Judge Corwin served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer which sentenced nineteen people to death during the trials. The house was moved about 35 feet to its current location in the when the adjacent street was widened. At this time the house was restored to its Century appearance.

The house is now a museum. Due to the incomplete nature of the documentation and the lack of field measurements to verify the drawings, the drawings may not meet HABS standards and have been marked as such. Most of these drawings are still in pencil, that combined with the age of the drawings, presented challenges when digitizing them, so the scanned images are not as clear as most of the drawings within the HABS collection.