Derby Summer House
The Derby Summer House, also known as the McIntire Tea-house, is a small but ornate 18th‑century building designed in 1793 by Samuel McIntire for Elias Hasket Derby’s farm in Salem, Massachusetts. It now sits on Glen Magna Farms in Danvers, Massachusetts, and has been owned by the Danvers Historical Society since 1958. It is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for being a rare, well‑preserved example of an 18th‑century summer house, and for its early American carved wooden figures on the roof.
The house is 20 feet square and two and a half stories tall, built in the Federal style. It is decorated with pilasters, swags, and Grecian urns, and its roof features two rustic wooden statues: a Reaper and a Shepherdess. The ground floor has central arched openings on the east and west sides, flanked by arched windows. The second floor shows swags and fluted Ionic pilasters at the corners and between the windows.
In 1901 the summer house was moved about four miles to its current site, where it opens onto a walled rose garden designed by Herbert Browne. The statues atop the house are not originals: the Shepherdess statue went missing during the move and was later found atop an Andover mill building damaged by fire; a duplicate was carved in 1924, and the original is now at the Peabody Institute. The Reaper statue fell in a 1981 storm and was replaced, with the original kept by the Danvers Historical Society.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:04 (CET).