Hawthorne’s book was based on this house. There wasn’t originally a store on the ground floor like there is in the book, so it was added on later to attract tourists. A number of the gables had already been removed by the time Hawthorne first laid eyes on the house, but they were added back on later. In the attic is the oldest domestic living space in the country! There were horse hairs in the wall stucco, which was used to keep it together. That means that the horse had been dead for hundreds of years!