Restoring History at the King Hooper Mansion

In 1938, during the Great Depression and against all odds, the nascent Marblehead Arts Association saved from ruin the elegant 18th-century King Hooper Mansion, located in the heart of old Marblehead. It purchased the derelict historic residence for use as its new headquarters through a tenacious grassroots effort. The members spiritedly broadcasted the catchphrase for the inaugural fundraising campaign– “ALL THE PENNIES COUNT; DIMES INTO DOLLARS MOUNT”– in a half-page feature they secured in the town’s newspaper The Marblehead Messenger.

Help Save Marblehead’s King Hooper Mansion We Have Subscribed, fundraising flyer, c. 1938. Marblehead Arts Association Archive.

King Hooper Mansion 

A combination of benign neglect and serendipity had shielded many of the mansion’s original architectural elements from destruction, including its intricately carved grand staircase. The residence was considered so historically significant that it had been painstakingly documented in 1933 though photographs and measured drawings produced by the New Deal’s Historic American Building Survey. Years later, in 1976, the King Hooper Mansion would be accepted for worthy inclusion in the National Registrar of Historic Places.

King Hooper Mansion, Newel and Balusters, Historic American Buildings Survey, 1933.

The mansion’s stately three-story façade with its symmetrical composition of elegant architectural forms, imitation stone ashlar courses, quoined corners, and delicately articulated cornice with pronounced dentil molding epitomizes the elegant classicism of its era’s highly fashionable colonial Georgian style. At the time it was erected around 1745, nothing in Marblehead rivaled its grandeur.  It set a standard of taste and opulence for an emerging wealthy merchant class that would transform the town from a hardscrabble fishing village to a prosperous international port of call during an age fueled by the burgeoning triangular trade of the Atlantic world in the decades before the American Revolution.

King Hooper Mansion, screen-print used for an MAA event flyer, 1955. Marblehead Arts Association Archive.

Cod and Slavery in British Marblehead

The mansion was built as a grand addition to a sizable 1728 home that Robert Hooper had inherited from his father, Greenleaf Hooper.  One of the wealthiest and most influential merchants in pre-revolutionary America, Robert Hooper owned a fleet of fishing vessels and traded their bounty of sought-after dried cod fish for luxury goods and specialty foods such as sugar, molasses, and rum at major ports in Europe and the West Indies. Local lore records that he was given the nickname “King” because of his civic generosity and good treatment of those who worked for him. Yet, Hooper enslaved people as domestic servants and laborers, and the economy of the triangular trade through which he made his fortune was wholly dependent on an abhorrent and immoral system of forced labor inflicted on millions of enslaved African and Native peoples on Caribbean plantations and in the North American British colonies.

Map of Colonial Trade Routes and Goods.

Contemporary Artists Save a Colonial Mansion

Nearly two centuries after Hooper’s time, the celebrated printmaker, photographer, and author Samuel Chamberlain was among the Marblehead Arts Association’s principal advocates for the 1938 purchase of the King Hooper Mansion. He eloquently articulated the urgency to save the “noblest” examples of America’s historic architecture as irreplaceable heritage. For Chamberlain, it was the older five story, gambrel-roofed wing of the mansion that garnered the greatest interest, calling it “one of the most picturesque structures in America” in an essay he wrote for press distribution. Among Chamberlain’s best-known fine art etchings are nostalgic views of the street and harbor façades of the King Hooper Mansion made shortly after the Marblehead Arts Association took possession of the property. A Picturesque View illustrated the frontispiece of a feature about old Marblehead in a prominent journal of the day. Summer Shadows was used to help raise funds for the mansion’s restoration through a deluxe subscription program for the organization’s newly forming support group, Friends of Contemporary Prints, in 1939.

Samuel V. Chamberlain, A Picturesque View (King Hooper Mansion), drypoint etching, 1939. Frank Chouteau Brown, Old Marblehead Massachusetts, Part Two: The Monograph Series, Vol. XXIV, No 3. Marblehead Arts Association Archive.

With the 1938 acquisition of the King Hooper Mansion the Marblehead Arts Association greatly enlarged its mission to restore, maintain, and interpret a significant historic building while simultaneously creating a vibrant contemporary arts organization with the goal to “make Marblehead an artistic…center by developing in this mansion a Leading New England Art Gallery” as highlighted in The Marblehead Messenger. Since then, successive generations of Marblehead Arts Association members have worked unflaggingly to fulfill the institution’s ambitious dual charge.

King Hooper Mansion informational booklet, produced by the MAA, undated mid-to-late-20th century.

King Hooper Mansion Restoration 2022

The Marblehead Arts Association’s current drive to accomplish once more a necessary significant restoration of the venerable King Hooper Mansion reflects this generation’s proud obligation and diligent effort to meet the bold vision of its predecessors. The restoration will preserve this seminal building for future public use, enjoyment, and edification, and generate new knowledge about how and when the original architectural elements were constructed and modified as well as how and why they were used and by whom. It will contribute to a more expansive and nuanced understanding of Marblehead’s colonial cultural and social history.

Today’s restoration plan has been meticulously mapped out in three phases and is being overseen by esteemed preservation architect D. Bruce Greenwald, a dedicated member of the Marblehead Arts Association’s Board of Directors. Phase 1 of the project is now complete and a great deal has been learned in the process.  Phases 2 and 3 should uncover thought-provoking evidence about the sequence of additions to the oldest wing of the mansion and their uses.

To learn more about current and other recent King Hooper Mansion renovations, see Bruce’s special web-feature.