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 Canadians), 23,038 were of foreign parentage (one or the other parent foreign-born) and 156 were negroes; (1910), 43,697. Area, 8.2 sq. m. Salem is served by the Boston & Maine and by interurban electric railways westward to Peabody, Danvers and Lawrence, eastward to Beverly, and southward to Marblehead, Swampscott, Lynn and Boston. It occupies a peninsula projecting toward the north-east, a small island (Winter Island) connected with the neck of the peninsula (Salem Neck) by a causeway, and some land on the mainland. Salem has many historical and literary landmarks. There, are three court-houses, one of granite (1839-1841) with great monolithic Corinthian pillars, another (1862), adjoining it, of brick, and a third (1908-1909) of granite, for the probate court. The City Hall was built in 1837, and enlarged in 1876. The Custom House (1818-1819) is described in the introduction to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and in it Hawthorne worked as surveyor of the port in 1845-1849. The public library building (1888) was given to the city by the heirs of Captain John Bertram.

History.—Salem was settled in 1626 by Roger Conant (1593-1679) and a company of “planters,” who in 1624 (under the Sheffield patent of 1623 for a settlement on the north shore of Massachusetts Bay) had attempted a plantation at Cape Ann, whither John Lyford and others had previously come from Plymouth through “dissatisfaction with the extreme separation from the English church.” Conant was not a separatist, and the Salem settlement was a commercial venture, partly agricultural and partly to provide a wintering place for Banks fishermen so that they might more quickly make their spring catch. Cape Ann was too bleak, but Naumkeag was a “pleasant and fruitful neck of land,” which they named Salem in June 1629, probably in allusion to Psalm lxxvi. 2. In 1628, a patent for the territory was granted by the New England Council to the Dorchester Company, in which the Rev. John White of Dorchester, England, was conspicuous, and which in the same year sent out a small company under John Endecott as governor. Under the charter for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (1629), which superseded the Dorchester Company patent, Endecott continued as governor until the arrival in 1630 of John Winthrop, who soon removed the seat of government from Salem first to Charlestown and then to Boston. In July or August 1629 the first Congregational Church (see, § American) in America was organized here; its “teacher” in 1631 and 1633 and its pastor in 1634-1635 was Roger Williams, a close friend of Governor Endecott and always popular in Salem, who in 1635 fled thence to Rhode Island to escape arrest by the officials of Massachusetts Bay. In 1686, fearing that they might be dispossessed by a new charter, the people of Salem for £20 secured a deed from the Indians to the land they then held. Although not strictly Puritan the character of Salem was not essentially different from that of the other Massachusetts towns. The witchcraft delusion of 1692 centred about Salem Village, now in the township of Danvers, but then a part of Salem. Ten girls, aged nine to seventeen years, two of them house servants, met during the winter of 1691-1692 in the home of Samuel Parris, pastor of the Salem Village church, and after learning palmistry and various “magic” tricks from Parris's West Indian slave, Tituba, and influenced doubtless by current talk about witches, accused Tituba and two old women of bewitching them. The excitement spread rapidly, many more were accused, and, within four months, hundreds were arrested, and many were tried before commissioners of oyer and terminer (appointed on the 27th of May 1692, including, q.v., of Boston, and three inhabitants of Salem, one being Jonathan Corwin); nineteen were hanged, and one was pressed to death in September for refusing to plead when he was accused. All these trials were conducted in accordance with the English law of the time; there had been an execution for witchcraft at Charlestown in 1648; there was a case in Boston in 1655; in 1680 a woman of Newbury was condemned to death for witchcraft but was reprieved by Governor Simon Bradstreet; in England and Scotland there were many executions long after the Salem delusion died out. The reaction came suddenly in Salem, and in May 1693 Governor William Phips ordered