SWAMPSCOTT — Nancy Lusignan Schultz began hearing about the house on 3 Boynton Street after owner Jay Duffy got in touch with town Historical Commission Chairwoman Justina Oliver.
“He said he had seen the listing of the house in an exhibition about the ‘Green Book’ at the Smithsonian,” Schultz said. “He was in touch with Justina to discuss it. It’s really sort of synchronicity in a lot of ways how this all came together.”
Schultz’s official capacity with the town is as the secretary of the Historical Society. But she brought extensive experience in scholarship to aiding the Historical Commission’s research into a local home that played a part in America’s evolving racial history.
The “Green Book” was an annual directory of homes in the U.S. that welcomed traveling Black Americans. It flourished during the Jim Crow era.
A movie centered around the book, with the screenplay written by Lynn native Brian Hayes Currie, and it was named best picture in 2019. Schultz said the commission’s research into the history of 3 Boynton St. led members to a Black couple who lived at the address for 30 years toward the turn of the 20th century. The next owners were interracial, she said.
“I feel this is important to focus on, given the history of the house,” she said.
The “Green Book” lists the house as a tourist home from 1939 through 1954, and it is the only house on the North Shore where Black tourists could be welcome, Schultz said. During that time, both owners were profiled in the directory.
“That was certainly very unusual for that particular time and place,” she said.
Researching and writing about 3 Boynton St. was a labor of love for Schultz, who has written several books on history and was an English professor at Salem State until her retirement in 2019.
Her study of the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” — and how it relates to the Holocaust in Europe during World War II — won an EXTRA! Award presented by the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, which is the nation’s oldest and most selective honor society for all academic disciplines.
Schultz said Swampscott was a stop on the “Green Book” route even as the town’s heyday of great estates was starting to decline.
“You had the Elihu Thomson house, the train station, and so many others. Regular people lived here too,” she said. “They weren’t all founders of General Electric or captains of industry.”
Her other research interests include the Salem witch trials which took place only 72 years after the Mayflower landing.
“That,” she says, “is another story, for another day.”