Nathaniel and Gwendolen Batchelder compiled an album of photos taken during their first year living in the Loomis Heads House. Among these images, given as a 1914 gift to Mr. Batchelder’s parents, is one captioned, “Living Room showing mantel from Old Salem Custom House.” Mr. B had grown up in Salem, Massachusetts, and his parents still resided there in 1914. The elder Batchelders may have procured this mantel from a building formerly used as one of the early 19^th century custom houses for the port city. This gracefully proportioned wooden fireplace surround—a physical reminder of Mr. B’s boyhood home—fit perfectly into the early 20^th century Georgian Revival style residence designed by the school’s architects, Murphy and Dana of New York. 

Batchelder memorialized his hometown in other ways too. A 1928 Log article reported that he kept two documents on his desk: a letter to Salem’s first US Collector of Customs, Joseph Hiller, from Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton; and a receipt of paid custom duties signed by Inspector of the Revenue, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1915 Batchelder requested that Murphy and Dana design the interior of his Founders Hall office after a room in Salem’s House of Seven Gables. Their drawings—as well as the office today—document the inspiration of Georgian style interior renovations done at the House after 1719 by owner John Turner II.

While a bustling seaport during the colonial period, Salem earned designation as a US port of entry in 1789 when the First Congress met to implement Alexander Hamilton’s economic plan for the young nation. Hiller’s appointment by President George Washington opened a new era for Salem and for America with ships leaving directly for and returning from Asia, Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and coastal US cities. In his communications with eastern port officials—like the one kept by Batchelder and others in the National Archives’ collection-- Hamilton underscored the vigilance necessary in customs work; during the US’s early years, import duties funded about 90 percent of the federal budget. A half century later at Hawthorne’s appointment, shipping in and out of Salem was in its long decline. By day, he inspected the collection of duties, such as the taxes paid in 1847 on a cargo of hides arriving on the Brig Zaine and recorded in document owned by Batchelder. At night he was “dreaming about stories,” as he told his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne had put writing aside for the stable salary of this political appointment. He lamented that “these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the …evenings have done.” Zachary Taylor’s 1848 election and the resulting partisan switch in the White House removed Hawthorne from his position. He returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter, with its introduction, “The Custom House,” in 1850.

Batchelder recalled his own Salem stories during the 1916 dedication of Founders Hall. He told of boyhood days spent with artisans, learning “to use tools from a particularly skillful cabinet maker who did not mind boys about his shop, printing in my grandfather’s newspaper office, and enough of pattern making in a nearby foundry so that I could cast a twelve-pound lead sphere for shot putting.” These early lessons would, in part, shape Batchelder’s commitment to the Loomis Founders’ vision for relevant and useful education, one that he described in 1913 as a school that would be “a community made up of many men of different kinds, each respecting the ideals of the others and working for the common good.” Mr. Batchelder’s Salem objects and Salem stories offered him a way of knowing he was at home at Loomis during his early years as a headmaster and throughout the nearly four decades of his tenure.