In early December, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., announced that it planned to permanently close the Phillips Library and move its storage and reading room to Rowley, Mass., a forty-minute drive away. The Phillips, where I did much of the research on the Salem portions of my book, is the major repository of Salem personal and organizational records. People in Salem are organizing to keep their history in their own city. My concern is how the planned move to Rowley will make Salem’s history not only inaccessible to Salemites but to historians of Salem like me. More details on the Phillips, its move, and the fight against it are at Donna Seger’s blog Streets of Salem here, here, and here.

I wrote a letter to the director of the Peabody Essex urging him to keep the Phillips and its collection in Salem where it belongs. I urge other historians of Salem to write similar letters. (I sent a copy of this letter to the Salem Historical Commission and to Salem’s mayor with a cover letter, and I would urge others to do the same.) You can also sign a petition.

12 December 2017

Dan L. Monroe
Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Director and CEO
Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem MA 01970

Dear Dr. Monroe:

I write to urge you to reconsider your plans, announced at the December 6 meeting of the Salem Historical Commission, to permanently close the Phillips Library in Salem and instead keep its collections in Rowley. I hope that you will maintain access to the library’s collections in Salem both for the public and for researchers like myself. Indeed, I hope that you will use this present controversy to recommit to the Essex Institute’s mission of scholarship about and preservation of Essex County’s and especially Salem’s history.

The Peabody Essex Museum has a special responsibility to the people of Salem. Salem residents and organizations entrusted their collections to the Phillips in the expectation that it would preserve and make accessible their documents to future generations of Salemites. In this way, the Essex Institute and the Phillips Library served as a de facto Salem historical society, and no independent organization ever grew to preserve local history. That the Phillips acted as a local repository and thus crowded out the creation of an independent organization creates for the Essex Institute’s successor a lasting obligation to the people of Salem to preserve their history in their city—not in a collections center 40 minutes away by car.

In fact, though, while I am sympathetic to the concerns of Salemites, they are not my primary concern. I am a professional historian. My book on the Salem Fire of 1914 relied heavily on research I did at the Phillips Library. Indeed, my bibliography lists twelve collections at the Phillips that I consulted. The documents I used are in the Phillips’ collection only because their creators and collectors—Salem residents and groups of residents—trusted that the Essex Institute would preserve and make accessible their papers. I have fond memories of the Phillips and especially of the very helpful staff there. That said, the problems with access I experienced in 2007 (not least charging researchers to use the library) have already significantly worsened, and access to the collections I used has been limited for several years. The proposed permanent move to Rowley will make things even worse.

The proposed permanent relocation to Rowley will affect researchers like me in several ways. First and most importantly, it is crucially important that local history research be embedded in the community. As a historian, I much better understood Salem’s history and geography from walking its streets and spending time there while I did my archival research. The research I did at the Phillips would have been much shallower and less rich had it not be literally embedded in Salem and its historic geography. Moreover, while it might not be the PEM’s concern, doing my research in Rowley would also have separated me from the stores and restaurants in Salem where I spent money while I was working at the Phillips, which should be seen as a further blow to the museum’s home city.

Second, moving the reading room to Rowley will make research substantially less convenient not only for Salem residents but for everyone. Rowley is, to be obvious about it, much farther away from Boston than Salem, which makes getting there harder if one is staying in Boston. I understand that the Collection Center will be off Route 1, inaccessible except by private automobile. This is drastically different from the Phillips, which is within walking distance of the MBTA train station. Even if the center were near the train station (or if researchers try to take the train and then call a cab from the train station), trains between Boston to Rowley are half as frequent as trains between Boston and Salem, and the trip is much longer.

Third, abandoning the Phillips Library’s legacy and responsibility to preserve and make accessible Salem’s history will have lasting implications on its ability to collect, and thus on the ability of historians and other researchers to learn about Salem. In the course of my research, I came across several collections that were not yet in institutional repositories. If Salem residents cannot trust the PEM to maintain the Essex Institute’s commitments, they will not donate their collections to the Phillips Library. Some of this material may go to Salem State University’s special collections, but other items will surely be lost. This will mean that Salem’s history will be less collected, less preserved, and more scattered. This will be a loss to all of us, including to future generations of historians like myself.

In short, I fear that your plans to move the Phillips collection to Rowley will make research like mine substantially harder and less rich. I strongly urge you to maintain the Essex Institute’s historical commitment to the people of Salem and their history and keep the collection accessible in Salem.

Sincerely,

Jacob A.C. Remes
Clinical assistant professor

cc: John D. Childs, Ann C. Pingree Library Director, Phillips Library
Professor Donna Seger, Salem State University
Ms. Jessica Herbert, Salem Historical Commission
Mayor Kimberley Driscoll, City of Salem