Three names cling to this house at 9 North Street: the Nathaniel Bowditch House, the Bowditch-Osgood House and the Curwen-Ward-Bowditch House. With a construction history apparently dating to 1759–60, this house was owned by three families important in the maritime history of Salem. It is a 3½‑story clapboarded house in the Federal style, five bays wide and two rooms deep, capped by a low‑pitch hip roof.
Its most elegant feature is the centered main entrance on the front façade. Nathaniel Bowditch, the founder of modern navigation (1773–1838), lived here from 1811 to 1823, and the house’s National Historic Landmark designation in 1965 stems from that association. The building you face was once at 312 Essex Street but was carefully moved here in the 1940s to avoid demolition for a road‑widening project.
Today it serves as the headquarters of Historic Salem, Inc., the organization that rescued it from demolition and restored it. Notice that centered entrance, then the clapboards and the symmetry of the bays across North Street.