Lappin Park
Town House Square

For nearly four centuries, this has been the central intersection of Salem, and many important events in American history occurred here in a building called a town house. A combination of a courthouse, a meeting place, and school, there were actually three successive town houses built: the first around 1636, the second in 1677, and the last in 1718. The bulk of the Witch Trials took place in the second town house in 1692, which stood in the center of Washington Street to the North. As tensions between the colonists and Great Britain rose the legislature of Massachusetts was barred from meeting, but in defiance of the law, the delegates met at the third town house (which stood at the middle of the square) on October 5th, 1774. They established the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. This act of rebellion made war almost inevitable and six months later the American Revolution exploded in Lexington.

Today, this area is known as Lappin Park. One of the most recent additions to the city’s landscape is the statue of Samantha Stephens, as portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery on the sitcom, Bewitched. In 2005, the city entered an agreement with TV Land to display the statue. Bewitched aired from 1964 to 1972, and focused on the capers of a witch married to an advertising executive. While the show was set in Connecticut, several episodes in 1970 were set and filmed in Salem.