Newburyport

The moments

The sourced timeline.

1. 01

   Before 1635 · Colonial · pre-1763

   Algonquian-speaking peoples lived at the mouth of the Quascacunquen long before English ships arrived.

   Indigenous History

   Long before any English colonist set foot on the marshes of the lower Merrimack, the estuary was home to Algonquian-speaking peoples. The Pennacook-Pawtucket, sometimes called the Pentucket, fished the river runs, harvested salt-marsh grasses, and worked seasonal camps along the Parker and Merrimack rivers.

   The river the English would later rename the Parker was known by the Indigenous name Quascacunquen, a word understood to refer to a waterfall. The territory that became Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury was identified in early colonial records under that name before it was renamed in 1635.

   The communities here were part of a broader network that included Pentucket at present-day Haverhill, Agawam at present-day Ipswich, and Wamesit further upriver. Smaller seasonal sites have been documented at Crane Pond Hill, Indian Hill, and along the Merrimack tributaries.

   Figures · Pennacook-Pawtucket, Pentucket

   SourceNewbury Historical CommissionSourceIndigenous History of Essex County, Cape Ann Museum
2. 02

   January 28, 1764 · Colonial · pre-1763

   Newburyport breaks off from agrarian Newbury to become a port city of its own.

   MaritimeCivic Firsts

   English settlers landed at the mouth of the Parker River in 1635 and called their new plantation Newbury. For more than a century the town tried to hold together two very different economies: inland farmers, and a growing waterfront of wharves, shipyards, and merchant families along the Merrimack.

   By the 1750s the maritime end of town had outgrown the rest. On January 28, 1764, the Massachusetts General Court passed an act erecting part of Newbury into a new town under the name Newburyport. It was the smallest town in the colony by land area and one of the most densely settled.

   Within a generation, ships built on the Merrimack carried Newburyport's flag to the West Indies, to Europe, and eventually around Cape Horn. Fish, timber, rum, sugar, and credit moved through its counting houses.

   SourceCustom House Maritime MuseumSourceEncyclopedia BritannicaSourceLibrary of Congress
3. 03

   July 15, 1791 · Revolution · 1763–1815

   The first cutter of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service slides down the ways at Newburyport.

   MaritimeCivic FirstsInnovation

   Congress authorized the Revenue Cutter Service on August 4, 1790, on Alexander Hamilton's urging, so the new Treasury Department could collect customs duties and run smugglers off the coast. Ten cutters were ordered. The first to be launched was the Massachusetts.

   Built by shipwright William Searle on the Merrimack, the 70-ton schooner went into the water at Newburyport on July 15, 1791. Captain John Foster Williams, a Massachusetts mariner of the Revolution, took command. His crew was four officers, four enlisted men, and two cabin boys.

   The Revenue Cutter Service was folded together with the Life-Saving Service in 1915 to create the modern United States Coast Guard. For that reason the Coast Guard counts the Massachusetts as its first cutter and Newburyport as one of its founding ports.

   “Newburyport is the birthplace of the Coast Guard.”

   Figures · John Foster Williams, William Searle, Alexander Hamilton

   SourceNational ArchivesSourceCustom House Maritime MuseumSourceU.S. Naval Institute, Naval History Magazine · 2024-04
4. 04

   Late 1700s · Revolution · 1763–1815

   Theophilus Parsons, the Newburyport lawyer who tutored John Quincy Adams, helps shape the early American legal mind.

   EducationCivic Firsts

   Theophilus Parsons trained for the bar in Newburyport in the 1770s and built one of the most influential law offices in the early republic. From 1787 to 1789 he tutored a young John Quincy Adams in law in that office.

   Parsons was a delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1779 and one of the twenty-six who drafted the state constitution. As a member of the so-called Essex Junto he is generally credited as the author of The Essex Result, the rebuttal that helped sink an earlier draft.

   He moved to Boston in 1800 and was named Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1806, serving until his death in 1813. The Smithsonian holds a contemporary portrait of him.

   Figures · Theophilus Parsons, John Quincy Adams

   SourceMassachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Mass.govSourceSmithsonian American Art MuseumSourceLibrary of Congress
5. 05

   December 10, 1805 · Revolution · 1763–1815

   William Lloyd Garrison is born in a wood-frame house on School Street.

   AbolitionCivic Firsts

   William Lloyd Garrison was born on December 10, 1805, in a wood-frame house at what is now 3-5 School Street, just up the hill from the harbor. His father, a sailor, abandoned the family a few years later.

   At thirteen, Garrison apprenticed at the Newburyport Herald, the local semi-weekly, under publisher Ephraim W. Allen. He learned the printer's trade from the type case up and was foreman before he was twenty. He began writing under the pseudonym Aristides.

   He left Newburyport for Boston, where in 1831 he founded The Liberator. By thirty-three he was the most denounced editor in America. The Newburyport house still stands. A plaque placed by the City Improvement Society in 1905 marks the spot.

   “I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.”

   Figures · William Lloyd Garrison, Ephraim W. Allen

   SourceNational Park ServiceSourceMassachusetts Historical SocietySourceNewburyport Herald historical record
6. 06

   1810 · Revolution · 1763–1815

   At its peak, Newburyport's merchant fleet ranks with the largest in Massachusetts.

   MaritimeLabor

   By 1810 Newburyport merchants owned 41 ships, 49 brigs, and 50 schooners. Twenty-one deepwater sailing ships for foreign trade were built on the Merrimack in that year alone.

   The port was the seat of an extensive trade with the East Indies and the China coast, and its commerce on the Merrimack rivaled that of Boston and Salem. The Custom House on Water Street, designed in 1835 by Robert Mills (the architect of the Washington Monument and the U.S. Treasury Building), is the surviving federal monument to that era.

   At the height of the sailing-ship economy, more tonnage of ships was built on the narrow North End shipyards of Newburyport than at any other point on the Atlantic coast, square mile for square mile.

   SourceCustom House Maritime MuseumSourceClipper Heritage TrailSourceMassachusetts Historical Commission, Form B
7. 07

   May 31, 1811 · Revolution · 1763–1815

   The Great Fire of 1811 burns the wooden downtown to the ground. The town rebuilds in brick.

   InnovationCivic Firsts

   Around 9:30 on the night of May 31, 1811, a fire broke out in a stable near the center of town. By morning roughly 250 wooden structures had burned and some 16.5 acres at the heart of Newburyport lay in charred ruins.

   Within months the town petitioned the legislature for what came to be called the Brick Act of 1811, requiring buildings over ten feet to be built of brick or stone, with masonry firewalls between sections. The act applied to the burned district between Market and Federal streets.

   Out of the rubble came Market Square and State Street as they look today: a unified Federalist brick downtown of merchant blocks, counting houses, and shops. It is often described as the first coordinated urban replanning effort in the country outside Washington, D.C.

   SourceBoston Globe · 2011-05-12SourceCity of NewburyportSourceNewburyport Preservation Trust
8. 08

   January 1, 1831 · Industrial · 1815–1880

   The Newburyport apprentice launches The Liberator and demands immediate, uncompromising abolition.

   AbolitionCivic Firsts

   On January 1, 1831, Garrison printed the first issue of The Liberator in a Boston attic. He set the type himself, the way he had learned to in Newburyport.

   He refused gradualism. He refused colonization. He refused to be polite. The masthead would run for thirty-five years, ending only when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865.

   Within a year of the first issue, Garrison helped organize the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, in 1832. The American Anti-Slavery Society followed in 1833. Wendell Phillips, who would become one of the movement's most powerful orators, joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society after witnessing a Boston mob drag Garrison through the streets in 1835.

   Figures · William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips

   SourceNational Park ServiceSourceMassachusetts Historical SocietySourceNew England Anti-Slavery Society historical record
9. 09

   July 3, 1844 · Industrial · 1815–1880

   Caleb Cushing of Newburyport signs the first U.S. treaty with China.

   MaritimeCivic Firsts

   Caleb Cushing grew up in Newburyport, practiced law there, and represented the district in Congress. In 1843 President John Tyler named him the first U.S. commissioner to China, sent in part to keep American merchants from being squeezed out of the China trade by British interests after the First Opium War.

   On July 3, 1844, Cushing and the Qing commissioner Qiying signed the Treaty of Wangxia at the Kun Iam Temple near Macao. The treaty opened five Chinese ports to American merchants, granted most-favored-nation status, and codified the principle of extraterritoriality for American citizens in China.

   It was the first treaty between the United States and China. Newburyport ships had already been calling at Canton for decades; Cushing's mission made the trade a formal matter of state.

   Figures · Caleb Cushing

   SourceU.S. Department of State, Office of the HistorianSourceU.S. Capitol Visitor Center
10. 10

    May 7, 1884 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920

    Anna Jaques endows a hospital for the seaport. It opens with thirteen beds.

    Women's RightsCivic Firsts

    In 1883 a Newburyport woman named Anna Jaques asked her physician, Dr. F.A. Howe, how she might best spend her money to help her town. He told her Newburyport needed a hospital.

    She gave $25,000, a sum large enough to put up a building at the corner of Broad and Monroe streets. On May 7, 1884, the first patient was admitted to Anna Jaques Hospital. It opened with thirteen beds.

    Jaques died in January 1885, less than a year after the hospital took her name. The Georgian Revival building at 25 Highland Avenue opened in 1904 and still serves the community more than 140 years later.

    Figures · Anna Jaques, Dr. F.A. Howe

    SourceAnna Jaques HospitalSourceBeth Israel Lahey Health, Anna Jaques Hospital
11. 11

    1942 · Modern · 1920–1965

    Plum Island becomes a federal wildlife refuge on the Atlantic Flyway.

    EnvironmentCivic Firsts

    In 1942 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, taking in most of Plum Island and the marshes south of Newburyport Harbor.

    The refuge runs to 4,662 acres of beach, dune, salt marsh, freshwater marsh, swamp, and mudflat. It sits squarely on the Atlantic Flyway and is a critical stopover for migratory shorebirds, waterfowl, and songbirds.

    More than 300 species of birds have been recorded there, along with piping plovers, harbor seals, and the salt-marsh fauna that the Pawtucket peoples once harvested. The refuge is one of the most-visited in the National Wildlife Refuge System.

    SourceU.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceSourceTrust for Public Land
12. 12

    1971 · Contemporary · 1965–today

    Newburyport saves its Federalist downtown from federal urban renewal.

    Civic FirstsInnovation

    In the early 1960s, Newburyport's downtown looked finished. Mills had left, lower State Street was boarded up, and the federal Urban Renewal program was preparing a plan to clear most of the Federalist brick district and replace it with a strip mall and surface parking.

    Local preservationists, organized through the Historical Society of Old Newbury, fought back. They proposed restoring the existing brick blocks instead of demolishing them. After a sustained campaign, HUD agreed to a then-unprecedented amendment to the urban renewal contract: federal funds could be used to rehabilitate the historic downtown rather than raze it.

    Market Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The wider Newburyport Historic District followed in 1984. The episode is taught as one of the first uses of historic preservation principles in a federal urban renewal project, and one of the most successful downtown rescues in the country.

    “It was the first time HUD let a city renew an urban-renewal district by preserving it.”

    SourceNewburyport Preservation TrustSourceHistory Newburyport, Historical Society of Old NewburySourceNational Register of Historic Places file, Newburyport Historic District

The people

Figures from Newburyport.

• William Lloyd Garrison

  Industrial · 1815–1880

  Born in Newburyport in 1805. Apprenticed at the Newburyport Herald at thirteen. Founded The Liberator in 1831 and led the radical wing of American abolition for thirty-five years.

• Caleb Cushing

  Industrial · 1815–1880

  Newburyport lawyer and congressman. First U.S. commissioner to China. Signed the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, the first treaty between the United States and China.

• Theophilus Parsons

  Revolution · 1763–1815

  Newburyport lawyer, drafter of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, tutor of John Quincy Adams, and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1806 to 1813.

• Anna Jaques

  Progressive Era · 1880–1920

  Newburyport benefactor who in 1884 endowed and built the city's first hospital. It opened with thirteen beds and still bears her name.

• John Foster Williams

  Revolution · 1763–1815

  Massachusetts mariner and Revolutionary veteran. First master of the Revenue Cutter Massachusetts, launched at Newburyport in 1791.