Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace

[5] Unable to afford a home of their own, the couple moved into the Union Street house, where the groom's widowed mother and three unmarried siblings already lived.

[8] Years later, in 1853, Hawthorne wrote of his birthplace in the National Review: "I was born in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, in a house built by my grandfather, who was a maritime personage.

The old household estate was in another part of the town, and had descended in the family ever since the settlement of the country; but this old man of the sea exchanged it for a lot of land situated near the wharves, and convenient to his business, where he built the house... and laid out a garden, where I rolled on a grass-plot under an apple-tree and picked abundant currants.

"[9] His mother Elizabeth also described Hawthorne's birthplace in a letter to one of his daughters, circa 1865: "Your father was born in 1804, on the 4th of July, in the chamber over the little parlour in the house in Union Street, which then belonged to my grandmother [Rachel Phelps] Hathorne, who lived in one part of it...

"[10] In 1958, the home was moved, without a later ell that had been added, to its current location at 27 Hardy Street on the grounds of the Turner-Ingersoll mansion, which Hawthorne had made famous in his novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851).