History Detectives, Part II (December 28, 2011)

Behold, a national treasure: the Salem Registry of Deeds. This public research library contains record of every real estate transaction in Essex County to as far back as 1640. We visited to figure out exactly who built our house and when.

One side of this enormous room is lined with indexes of grantors; the other with indexes of grantees. Our first step was to thumb carefully through the yellowed pages of a book that enumerated, in perfect cursive penmanship, grantors in the county  from 1640 to 1799. With pages just this side of dust, it’s a treasure map with clues to the earliest history of some of the nation’s oldest houses, built and traded over a period of 160 years. We were amazed that any member of the public can walk in and handle it without supervision. 

We know from the state that our house was probably built by Henry Dodge or Elbridge Dodge. Dodges, however, were the Smiths of early Essex County; their names fill 27 pages in this earliest registry of land sales: Phineas Dodge, Grover Dodge, Nehemiah, Barnabus, and Ephraim Dodge. We perused them in search of Henry or Elbridge until we found this mention of a Henry, with a cross reference to the chronicle of land sales in 1828.

In that book we learned that on March 13, 1828, Elbridge Dodge paid Henry Dodge $543 for four parcels of land in the vicinity of our house. We assume the house was part of one of the properties, so we’ll return to Salem and trace the history further, for clues to when Henry originally built our home. Some evidence suggests this event may have taken place before the start of the 1800s.