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The Salem Cross Inn

Route 9, 260 West Main Street
PO Box 553
West Brookfield, MA 01585
Phone: 508 867-2345

You can get directions here.

It’s about 3 hours and 15 minutes from NYC, 1 hour and 15 minutes from Boston, an hour from Hartford, CT, and 4 hours from Princeton, NJ.

For those of you who are flying in, it’s near the following airports:

Logan Airport (Boston) — approx. 1 hour to Sturbridge
Bradley Airport (Hartford) — 45 min. to Sturbridge
Providence — approx. 1 hour to Sturbridge

From the Salem Cross website:

The Salem Cross Inn is named for the witch-mark found on the front door-latch of the Inn. In the town of Salem and throughout the Bay Colony this mark was used to protect their inhabitants against “ye evills of witchcraft and diverse other manifestations of devilltry.”

Since the Inn has been restored by the Salem family, led by Richard Salem, the pun on the name decided the title of the Inn. Furnished throughout with American antiques, the Inn displays the nation’s only known operating Roasting Jack, a c. 1700 device the innkeepers use to cook beef, game and fowl at the huge hearths.

The original King’s Grant of the Salem Cross Inn was made to a grandson of Peregrine White, the Pilgrim child born on the Mayflower as it lay in Plymouth Harbor. For eight generations members of the White family lived here, through Queen Anne’s War, the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War and numerous Indian raids. John White was killed by the Indians in Brookfield in 1710, prior to the building of the main house. The original ell with its “borning room” and walls lined with crude hand-made bricks to deflect Indian arrows awaits restoration.

The area, historic in Indian Wars, was crossed by the Bay Path, the Hadley Path and the old Boston Post Road, and it was a favorite camping grounds for the Wampanoags, whose chieftain, Philip of Pokanoket, is remembered for King Philip’s War. Relics are still to be found in freshly turned fields. The choice of the house site itself was dictated by the ever present fear of Indian attacks, for in the cellar, not too far from the giant central chimney square, flows a steady stream of pure, cold spring-water. Legend has it that when the house was preparing for possible attack by Indians, pots of water were placed in every room against the use of fire arrows, and the smaller children were told to hide in the cellar in a recess within the chimney base.

Of additional interest is the fact that the Salem Cross Inn is located in West Podunk, being about two miles westward of the area known from Indian times as Podunk. To the rest of the country Podunk has connotations of a mythical location, but around these parts it always has referred to as specific area.