A currier named John Ward raised the John Ward House at 9 Brown Street in Salem, today a National Historic Landmark. Its early construction history stretches between 1684 and 1723, and it is celebrated as an excellent example of First Period architecture. You can think of this house both for its original colonial fabric and for the early 20th-century restoration carried out by antiquarian George Francis Dow.
Now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum, it was also among the first colonial-era houses in the United States to be opened as a museum, and it received National Historic Landmark designation in 1968. The building was erected in three distinct phases. In 1684 John Ward, a currier by trade, built the earliest portion: a two-story block with one room on each floor and a large chimney set at one end.
Ward later extended the house to the right of that chimney, producing the familiar five-bay facade with a center entry and central chimney. The final phase was a rear lean-to that gave the house its saltbox appearance, added not long before Ward’s death in 1734, by which time he was sharing the house with his son Benjamin. Notice the five-bay facade, the center entry and chimney, and the rear lean-to forming this saltbox silhouette.