Salem Maritime

In the decades after the Revolution, Salem, Massachusetts became one of the richest ports in America by trading directly with the far side of the world. Its merchant captains opened commerce with India, China, and the East Indies while larger Atlantic ports were still consolidating, filling Salem's wharves with pepper, silk, and porcelain and its Custom House with the wealth of a genuinely global colonial-era trade network run from a small New England harbor.

Salem's Derby Wharf, built beginning in 1762 by merchant Richard Derby, grew into the longest wharf in the harbor as Salem's shipping fortunes rose. After the Revolution cut off traditional British trade routes, Salem captains including Derby's son Elias Hasket Derby pioneered new, highly profitable routes to India, Sumatra, and China, briefly making Salem one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the young United States and a first American window onto Asian trade.

The federal government built Salem's Custom House in 1819 to collect duties on this lucrative trade; author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendant of Salem's original Puritan settlers, worked there as a surveyor from 1846 to 1849 and drew on the experience to open his novel The Scarlet Letter. By the mid-19th century, however, the harbor's shallow waters could not accommodate the larger ships of the industrial era, and Salem's maritime trade gradually declined in favor of deeper ports like Boston and New York.

Congress established Salem Maritime National Historic Site in 1938, the first National Historic Site in the National Park System, preserving Derby Wharf, the Custom House, and several merchant-era buildings along Salem's waterfront. A full-scale replica of the merchant ship Friendship, built in 1797 and lost in the War of 1812, was constructed in 2000 and now docks at the wharf.