Newburyport, Massachusetts

• 1. Introduction

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  Newburyport, Massachusetts sits 35 miles northeast of Boston on the south bank of the Merrimack River, and its clock tower holds a bell cast by Paul Revere. That detail alone signals what kind of place this is. A city shaped by saltwater, by trade, by the people who sailed out of it and the ones who were smuggled through it under cover of night. How did a town covering just 647 acres at its founding grow into a place claimed by abolitionists, sea captains, clipper ship builders, a Nobel laureate, and a horror writer's imagination? And why, in the 1970s, did Newburyport come within a vote of tearing most of itself down?

• 2. Born from a Split

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  On the 28th of January 1764, the General Court of Massachusetts passed legislation separating part of Newbury into its own town. The act explained the logic plainly: the people living by the water were mostly merchants, traders, and craftsmen, while those inland were chiefly farmers. Managing a single town across such different economies had produced, in the legislature's words, "many difficulties and disputes." Governor Francis Bernard approved the act on the 4th of February 1764. The new town of Newburyport was the smallest in Massachusetts, with 647 acres, a population of 2,800 people, and 357 homes. Three shipyards already operated along the waterfront, but no bridges crossed the Merrimack yet. Travelers relied on ferries, including one at the foot of Greenleaf Lane, later called State Street, which carried the Portsmouth Flying Stage Coach running between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Boston. That ferry crossing was Newburyport's first commercial artery, and the shipyards along the bank would soon make it one of the busiest ports on the New England coast.

• 3. A Port Built on Trade

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  Situated near the mouth of the Merrimack River, Newburyport became a center for fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and silverware manufacture. The city's sea captains participated in the triangular trade: importing West Indian molasses and exporting rum distilled from it, with the distilleries clustered around Market Square near the waterfront. Caldwell's Old Newburyport rum was manufactured locally until 1961, long outlasting the era of sail that made it possible. From about 1832, Newburyport added ships to the whaling fleet, and later the yards produced clipper ships, among the fastest ocean-going vessels ever built. The Merrimack Arms and Brown Manufacturing Company ran a factory here between 1867 and 1873, making Southerner Derringer pistols. A 1792 bridge built two miles above town connected the north and south banks at a point where the river contained an island. Today the waterfront parking lot occupies the ground where the shipyards once stood, and the docks that once extended into the channel of the Merrimack are visible only on old maps.

• 4. The Underground Railroad

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  The first leg of the triangular trade involved the purchase of enslaved people from West Africa, and many Newburyporters were anti-abolitionists for that reason. Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, and in the early 1800s, roughly 6,000 runaway slaves were living in Newburyport. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 changed everything: it required all states to capture and return runaways, forcing people to flee the country entirely or risk re-enslavement. Some white residents became stops on the Underground Railroad. Because Newburyport was a port city with direct connections to the Atlantic, its abolitionists were often mariners. Captain Alexander Graves was one of them. He smuggled enslaved people out of the South and on to Canada. William Lloyd Garrison, born in Newburyport in 1805, became one of the most prominent abolitionist voices in American history. Caesar Sarter, a formerly enslaved man who had lived in Newburyport and gained his freedom, became an essayist and abolitionist during the same era.

• 5. Preachers, Witches, and the Awakening

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  In 1680, a woman named Elizabeth Morse was convicted of witchcraft in Newbury, the town that would later be split to form Newburyport. She was confined to her property unless accompanied by a clergyman, and she died there in 1690. Eighty years later, a very different kind of religious drama unfolded. George Whitefield, an English preacher who helped inspire the First Great Awakening in America, arrived in Newburyport in September 1740. The revival that followed his preaching brought Old South Church into existence. Whitefield died in Newburyport in 1770, and before he died, he asked to be buried under the pulpit of that church. He remains there. The First Presbyterian Church in the city dates to 1756, and its clock tower holds the Paul Revere-cast bell mentioned by visitors for generations.

• 6. Saved from the Wrecking Ball

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  By the 1950s and 1960s, the same forces reshaping downtowns across America had arrived in Newburyport. Strip malls on the periphery pulled spending away from local merchants. The construction of major highways brought Lawrence and Lowell into shopping range. By 1970, the historic downtown was scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt using federal money. Plans ran the full range from hotels to new shops, and, with considerable irony, a strip mall, with only a few buildings to be kept for historical reasons. At the last moment, the city changed course. Newburyport signed a federal grant that allowed it to preserve most of its historic architecture instead. Renovation began in the early 1970s along State Street, and continued through most of the decade, culminating in the creation of a pedestrian mall along Inn Street. The Market Square Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, the same year the decade-long renewal began. Preservationists have since held up Newburyport as a model for maintaining urban heritage while keeping a city liveable. High Street, lined with Federal-style houses and widow's walks built by seafaring entrepreneurs, was part of what they saved.

• 7. Notable Lives

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  John Quincy Adams, the future president, lived in Newburyport from 1787 to 1788. Timothy Dexter, born in 1748, became famous locally for his eccentric writing and unconventional business dealings. Tamsen Donner, born in 1801, would later become one of the most remembered members of the Donner Party. Donald McKay, born in 1810, went on to become one of the most celebrated shipbuilders in American history. Robert S. Mulliken, born in 1896, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1966. Adolphus Greely, born in 1844, became a polar explorer. Lothrop Withington, a genealogist and historian born in 1856, died when the RMS Lusitania sank. The city also produced Nikole Beckwith, a writer and filmmaker; Joe Keery, an actor born in 1992; and Andre Dubus III, a novelist born in 1959 who returns to the city's Newburyport Literary Festival. John H. Couch, born in 1811, became a sea captain and a founder of Portland, Oregon, taking the navigational skills Newburyport gave him to the other end of the continent.

• 8. Innsmouth's Real Address

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  H. P. Lovecraft drew on Newburyport when he invented the decaying, fish-haunted city of Innsmouth for his 1931 story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The actual Newburyport appears in the story's first chapter, when the narrator departs from it on his way to Innsmouth, setting up the real city as the sane world that the narrator is about to leave behind. Lovecraft based his fictional port largely on what he saw in Newburyport. The 2019 Goldsmiths Prize winner, a novel called "Ducks, Newburyport," also takes the city as a central reference. W. Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist, chose Newburyport as the subject of the Yankee City project, described as the most ambitious community study ever undertaken in the United States. The city has, in other words, attracted the attention of people trying to understand both the darkness and the structure of American life, which is perhaps what happens when a place carries three centuries of shipbuilding, trade, abolitionism, and architecture all at once. The Newburyport Five Cents Savings Bank, founded on State Street in 1854, still operates today, one of the oldest banks in the United States, a quiet thread connecting the city that nearly disappeared to the one that survived.