Climate Change Comes for the House of the Seven Gables

SALEM, Mass.—Paul Wright leans over a 17th-century granite barrier and points at a faint watermark depicting Salem Harbor’s daily rise and fall.

“On a normal day, high tides reach just four feet from the top of the seawall,” he says. “When there’s a big storm or king tide, that’s when it gets close to spilling over.”

That seawall is the first line of defense for one of America’s most storied homes, protecting it from centuries of battering New England storms. The colonial manse, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, is now best known as the setting for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables.” Sixty years after the novel was published in 1851, the structure fell into disrepair until Caroline Emmerton, a philanthropist, restored it in the early 1900s as both a museum and immigrant se