The Parson Capen House in Topsfield was the home of Reverend Joseph Capen from 1623 to 1725. Capen was the minister of Topsfield during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
Built for Joseph Capen in 1683, the house is considered one of the finest surviving examples of Elizabethan architecture in America.
The house was built with English-style architecture and has several unique 17th-century features, such as a small entrance hall, a studded “Indian door,” two summer beams (one of which has the date “July 8, 1683” carved into it), overhangs called jetties on the front and sides of the building with carved pendants on the corners and a gable roof.
The house has four rooms, each featuring a fireplace, and some of its original furnishings, such as a baluster-back armchair inscribed “P. Capen 1708,” which is believed to have been part of the wedding furniture for Joseph’s daughter Priscilla Capen.
The house was fortified with a bricked interior of pine-paneled walls to defend against Native American attacks. The house also has two cellars, one under the parlor and one under the kitchen. The cellars are not connected and are accessed through two trap doors on the parlor floor and the kitchen floor. The parlor floor has a lining of clay mixed with straw filled between the Joists in order to make the floor warmer in the winter.
Joseph Capen agreed to become the minister of Topsfield in 1682 but he declined to live in the existing parsonage at the time because of its poor condition. He was instead awarded 12 acres of land upon which he built this house in 1683.
Capen was living in the house with his wife, four daughters, and three sons, when he was officially ordained as Topsfield’s minister in 1684. His congregation included Mary Easty and Sarah Wildes who were later accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.
During the trials, Capen contributed to Cotton and Increase Mather’s books Return of Several Ministers and Cases of Conscience of Evil Spirits, both of which cautioned against using spectral evidence and folk tests in the trials.
When Mary Easty and her sister Sarah Cloyce (who lived in Salem Village) were accused of witchcraft they both named Reverend Capen as a character witness who would vouch for their innocence. Mary Easty and Sarah Wildes were convicted and hanged but the trials ended before Sarah Cloyce could be tried.
There is a local legend associated with the house that says one Sunday morning Capen was in the middle of a sermon when he suddenly stopped and stormed down the aisle.
His parishioners followed him across the street where he flung open the front door of his house and reportedly found Satan bargaining with his handmaiden for her soul.
Capen seized a cup of peas and scattered them on the floor as he challenged the devil to pick them up one by one while he recited the Lord’s Prayer backward, declaring that the victor would win the girl’s soul.
The reverend ultimately won and a small hole where the devil supposedly flew up through the ceiling is still on display in the house (Northend 7-8.)
Capen continued to serve as Topsfield’s minister for forty years until he died in 1725. He left the house to his son, Nathaniel, and left other land he had purchased to his other son John.
Between 1747 and 1758, the house had numerous owners, with the first being Nathaniel Capen’s sister and nephew, who sold the house to Edmund Putnam of Danvers. Putnam then sold it to his father-in-law Israel Andrews, who later sold it back to Edmund Putnam, who then sold it to Reverend John Emerson in 1758.
The house remained in the Emerson family until Harriet Emerson Holmes died prematurely in 1849 and the house passed to her husband Charles Holmes.
Holmes died in 1886 and the house was later inherited by Anna Balch Jordan from her father Humphrey Balch in 1897, although it is not exactly clear how Humphrey Balch had acquired it.
In 1913, Anna Jordan sold the house to the Topsfield Historical Society for $2,100. The society restored it, with the help of a $1,100 donation from a friend of the society, under the direction of George Francis Dow and opened it to the public as a historic house museum.
On October 9, 1960, the house was designated a National Historic Landmark. On October 15, 1966, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and, on June 7, 1976, it was designated a U.S. Historic District Contributing Property.
Sources:
The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings, Volume 5. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1968.
Northend, Mary Harrod. Door Lore. Curtis Service Bureau, 1920.
Historical Manual of the Congregational Church of Topsfield, Massachusetts, 1663-1907. Congregational Church of Topsfield, 1907.
Dow, George Francis. “Building Agreements in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.” Old Time New England: The Bulletin of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Volume 13, Issue 3, Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1923, pp 131-134
“Historic Building Detail: TPF.1 Capen, Rev. Joseph House.” MACRIS, mhc-macris.net/details?mhcid=TPF.1
Maguire, Mary B. “Topsfield’s Capen House.” Boston Sunday Globe, 7 Nov. 1954.