Salem Pioneer Village was and is “the first living history museum in the United States”. It opened in June of 1930, with a full three-acre reconstruction showing visitors what life was like for the colony in 1630.

Lovecraft visited a few years later and wrote of it…

[1933]

“Among the novelties at Salem was a perfect reconstruction of the original pioneer settlement of 1626–30, with the crude shelters, wigwams, huts, & cottages which preceded the building of actual houses of European size, pattern, & solidity. Of course no originals of these rude domiciles survive, but accurate scholarship has been able to fashion pretty definite facsimiles from detailed contemporary accounts. The restored village is situate in a park at the harbour’s edge, amidst a landskip made to look as much as possible like the primal topography of Salem. Not only are the early huts represented, but typical industries like blacksmith-shops, salt works, fish-drying outfits, saw-pits, & the like are faithfully shewn. The whole forms the clearest & most vivid presentation I have ever seen of the very first stage of New-England life, & ought to help anyone to reestablish the true ancestral orientation which these disorder’d times so gravely disturb.

[1933]

“… the climax [of Salem] was the splendid reproduction of the pioneer Salem settlement of 1626 et seq., carefully constructed & laid out in Forest River Park. It consists of a generous plot of ground at the harbour’s edge, painstakingly landscaped & covered with absolutely perfect duplicates of the very earliest huts & houses – dwellings of a sort now utterly vanished. All the early industries are also reproduced – there being such things as an ancient saw-pit, black-smith shop, salt-works, brick-plant, fish-drying outfit, & so on. Nothing else that I have ever seen gives one so good a picture of the rough pioneer life led during the first half-decade of New England colonisation.”

[1934]

“The lore of ‘yarbs’ [herb-lore] is a definite element in the colour of early America, & one of the salient features of the reproduced pioneer village in Salem is a garden where all the traditional species are cultivated, so that the visitor may see them both growing, & hung up on walls & rafters to dry.”