John Ward House
4.7 (44)museum
4.7 (44)Built in 1684, this steep-gabled home was moved on ox-drawn logs to become America’s first outdoor architecture museum.
Description
A standout of First Period architecture, the house retains textbook seventeenth-century features: a large central chimney, an asymmetrical façade, a batten door, diamond-paned leaded casements, and a second-story overhang.
Originally built for a leatherworker on a plot opposite the jail used during the Salem Witch Trials, it later declined into an 1890s tenement housing some of the city's poorest residents. Curator George Francis Dow intervened to prevent its demolition, making its subsequent restoration one of the country's earliest projects dedicated to historic interpretation.
