Turner partially funded the house's construction through his business of selling fish to slave plantations in the West Indies.

Facing south towards Salem Harbor, it was originally a two-room, 2+1⁄2-story house with a projecting front porch and a massive central chimney.

By 1676, Turner had added a spacious south (front) extension with its own chimney, containing a parlor on the ground floor, with a large bed chamber above it.

In the first half of the 18th century, John Turner II remodeled the house in the new Georgian style, adding wood paneling and sash windows.

[5] His cousin told him the house's history, and showed him beams and mortises in the attic indicating locations of former gables.

In January 1851, he wrote to his publisher James T. Fields that the book was nearly finished, "only I am hammering away a little on the roof, and doing a few odd jobs that were left incomplete.

[10] Horace Ingersoll, Susanna's adopted son, told Hawthorne a story of Acadian lovers that later inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline.

Boston architect Joseph Everett Chandler supervised the restoration, which among other alterations reconstructed missing gables.

In some cases historical authenticity was sacrificed in the interest of appealing to visitors, who expected the house to match the one Hawthorne described in his romantic novel.

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace is now immediately adjacent to the House of the Seven Gables, and access to it is granted with either a regular admission fee or a grounds pass.