North Shore · MA-06
Peabody
The leather city, and the town that taught America how to give.
Overview
Peabody sits on land the Naumkeag people fished and tanned long before the English arrived. It spent two centuries as the southern parish of Danvers, set off in 1855 as South Danvers, and renamed itself in 1868 for a poor farm boy who had become one of the richest men in the world and the most consequential philanthropist of the 19th century. By 1900 its tanneries processed leather for the country. By 1915 a third of its residents were foreign born, drawing Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish, Armenian, and Ottoman Turkish workers to a riverfront that ran chemical brown for fifty years. The mills are mostly gone. The neighborhoods, the parishes, and the civic instinct that George Peabody set in motion are still here.
The moments
The sourced timeline.
- 01
Before 1620 · Colonial · pre-1763
A Naumkeag fishing place on the North River
Indigenous HistoryThe land that is now Peabody was a core habitation area of the Naumkeag, an Eastern Algonquian people whose name meant fishing place. They lived in seasonal villages along what is now the North River, fished the estuaries, farmed the uplands, and tanned hides on the same waters that English settlers would later use for the same purpose.
The Naumkeag were part of a larger network of communities under the sachem Nanepashemet and, after his death in war with the Tarrantine in the late 1610s, his widow the Squaw Sachem. Smallpox epidemics in 1617 to 1619 and again in 1633 killed most of the population before sustained English settlement of the interior parishes began.
Descendants of the Naumkeag are represented today through the Massachusett Tribe, which still exists as a Native nation.
Figures · Nanepashemet, Squaw Sachem, Wenepoykin (Sagamore George)
- 02
1639 · Colonial · pre-1763
The first colonial tanning grant on the North River
LaborInnovationThe earliest written record of English tanning in what is now Peabody comes from 1639, when Philemon Dickerson was granted land in the South Parish of Salem to make tan pits and dress goat skins and hides. The Naumkeag had been using the same waters for the same purpose for generations.
The choice was not accidental. Tanning required clean running water, oak bark for tannin, and space for malodorous, chemically intensive pits. The North River and the streams that fed it offered all three. Over the next two centuries the parish would build the largest concentration of tanneries in the country on top of that geography.
Figures · Philemon Dickerson
- 03
February 18, 1795 · Revolution · 1763–1815
George Peabody is born in a single-room farmhouse
Civic FirstsEducationGeorge Peabody was born on February 18, 1795, in a Federal-style farmhouse on Old Boston Road in what was then the South Parish of Danvers. He was the third of seven children in a poor family. He attended school for only a few years, and when his father died in 1811 he left work as a clerk to support his widowed mother and six siblings.
In 1816 he moved to Baltimore. By 1837 he was in London, building the merchant bank that would help establish the credit of the young United States in European markets. By 1850 he was one of the wealthiest Americans alive. He never forgot the parish he came from. His birthplace still stands as the George Peabody House Museum on Washington Street.
Figures · George Peabody, Thomas Peabody, Judith Peabody
- 04
1852 · Industrial · 1815–1880
The library that started modern American philanthropy
EducationCivic FirstsIn the spring of 1852, the Danvers Centennial Committee wrote to George Peabody in London inviting him to the town's hundredth-birthday celebration. He could not attend. On May 26 he wrote back with a $20,000 gift to found a free public library in his home parish, on two conditions: that it be free to everyone, and that it include a lyceum for public lectures.
The cornerstone of the Peabody Institute Library was laid on August 20, 1853, by Abbott Lawrence, the U.S. ambassador to Britain. The library has operated continuously from the same brick building on Main Street ever since. It is among the oldest public libraries in the United States to do so.
The 1852 gift was the first major public benefaction of George Peabody's life. Every Peabody-funded institution that followed, in Baltimore, in London, at Yale, at Harvard, and across the post-Civil-War South, traced back to the model he set in his hometown.
Figures · George Peabody, Abbott Lawrence
- 05
May 18, 1855 · Industrial · 1815–1880
The South Parish becomes its own town
Civic FirstsOn May 18, 1855, the southern parish of Danvers was incorporated by the Massachusetts General Court as the separate town of South Danvers. The split followed decades of friction between the agricultural northern parish and the booming, industrial southern parish, which by then held most of the area's tanneries, shoemakers, and currying shops.
It would keep the name South Danvers for thirteen years. In 1868 it would rename itself again, this time after the man it considered its most important son.
- 06
March 26, 1862 · Industrial · 1815–1880
The first major social-housing trust in the world
Civic FirstsLaborOn March 26, 1862, George Peabody published an open letter in The Times of London announcing a gift of £150,000 to build sanitary, affordable housing for the city's working poor. He would more than triple the gift before his death, to £500,000.
The Peabody Donation Fund, today the Peabody Trust, opened its first block in Spitalfields in February 1864. By 1882 it housed more than 14,600 people in 3,500 dwellings, with shared laundries, bathhouses, and playgrounds at a moment when most London tenements had none.
The Trust is widely considered the first major social-housing organization in the world. Queen Victoria offered Peabody a baronetcy and the Grand Cross of the Bath in thanks. He declined both. She had a private portrait of herself painted for him instead. It hangs today at the Peabody Institute Library on Main Street.
“To ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness.”
George Peabody, letter to The Times of London, March 26, 1862 Figures · George Peabody, Queen Victoria
- 07
1867 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Two million dollars for Southern schools after the war
EducationCivil RightsCivic FirstsIn February 1867, eighteen months after Appomattox, George Peabody assembled a board of trustees that included Ulysses S. Grant, Admiral David Farragut, and Hamilton Fish, and endowed them with an initial $1 million to rebuild public schooling in the former Confederacy. He doubled the gift two years later. The Peabody Education Fund eventually distributed roughly $3.5 million across the South and West Virginia between 1867 and 1898.
It was one of the first large Northern philanthropic interventions in Southern education after the Civil War. Its record was uneven. The Fund's trustees pursued teacher training and existing schools rather than direct support for newly established Black schools, and over time their grants disproportionately flowed to white institutions. Historians today read it as both a pioneering act of national philanthropy and a hand in the construction of the segregated Southern school system that would last another century.
When the Fund dissolved in 1914 its remaining assets endowed the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, now part of Vanderbilt University.
“This I give to the suffering South for the good of the whole country.”
George Peabody, 1869, on augmenting the Education Fund Figures · George Peabody, Ulysses S. Grant, David G. Farragut, Hamilton Fish
- 08
1866 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Founding the Peabody Museums at Yale and Harvard
EducationInnovationIn October 1866, George Peabody gave $150,000 to Yale to found the Peabody Museum of Natural History at the request of his nephew, the paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The same year he matched the gift with another $150,000 to Harvard to found the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the first institutions in the country to treat anthropology as a science.
Harvard's Peabody opened its first exhibit in 1867 with a collection of prehistoric artifacts from the Merrimack Valley. Yale's Peabody opened to the public in 1876. Both remain among the oldest and largest museums of their kind in the world.
Figures · George Peabody, Othniel Charles Marsh
- 09
April 30, 1868 · Industrial · 1815–1880
South Danvers renames itself for its most famous son
Civic FirstsOn April 30, 1868, the Massachusetts General Court approved the town of South Danvers's petition to change its name to Peabody, in honor of the philanthropist born in its South Parish in 1795. George Peabody was 73 years old and in failing health in London. He died the following year.
It is a rare thing for an American town to rename itself after a living person. Peabody did it because it understood, correctly, that the man it was naming had already given the world more than any private American had ever given.
Figures · George Peabody
- 10
November 1869 to February 1870 · Industrial · 1815–1880
The Royal Navy carries George Peabody home
Civic FirstsGeorge Peabody died at the London home of his friend Sir Curtis Lampson on November 4, 1869. With Queen Victoria's approval, the Dean of Westminster gave him a funeral and a temporary grave inside Westminster Abbey, an extraordinary honor for a foreigner.
His will instructed that he be buried in the town of his birth. Prime Minister William Gladstone arranged for his remains to be returned to the United States aboard HMS Monarch, then the newest and largest warship in the Royal Navy. The ship arrived at Portland, Maine, in January 1870, where it was met by Admiral David Farragut. After a 96-day transatlantic funeral procession, Peabody was buried on February 8, 1870, at Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, less than two miles from the farmhouse where he was born.
Figures · George Peabody, Queen Victoria, William Gladstone, David G. Farragut
- 11
1894 to 1919 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Peabody becomes the leather capital of the world
LaborInnovationImmigrationArthur C. Lawrence and his partner Horace A. Southwick founded the A. C. Lawrence Leather Company in Peabody in 1894, taking over the old Sanger Glue Factory off Lowell Street. By 1909 the company employed 2,150 workers across 32 buildings. By 1919 it was processing two million hides, two and a half million calf skins, and four and a half million sheep and lamb hides a year.
That same year Peabody was recognized as the world's largest producer of leather. Ninety-one separate leather establishments operated inside the city limits. Locals called it simply The Leather City.
The riverbanks ran chemical brown for fifty years. The workforce was almost entirely immigrant: Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish, Armenian, French Canadian, and a large community of Turkish and Kurdish speakers from the Ottoman province of Harput, whose boarding houses gave Walnut Street the local name Ottoman Street.
Figures · Arthur C. Lawrence, Horace A. Southwick
- 12
February 26, 1906 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
St. Vasilios and one of the most Greek towns in America
ImmigrationCivic FirstsThe first Greek residents of Peabody were the Adrianos brothers, Dimitrios and George, who arrived from Sparta by way of Lowell in 1897 to work in the tanneries. Within eight years more than 500 Greek immigrants had settled in Peabody and the surrounding North Shore towns, drawn by leather work that paid steadily and required little English.
On February 26, 1906, the community incorporated its parish as St. Vasilios, one of the earliest Greek Orthodox parishes in New England. The cornerstone of the church was laid in April 1913 at a ceremony attended by more than two thousand people. The building was dedicated in 1917 and still stands on Pierpont Street.
In 1912 the parish opened a Greek-American School, the sixth Greek school in the United States. By 1920 Peabody held one of the largest Greek American populations per capita in the country, a community that shaped the city's restaurants, churches, and political life for the next century.
Figures · Dimitrios Adrianos, George Adrianos
- 13
October 28, 1915 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
After 21 girls die, Peabody rewrites the country's fire codes
Civic FirstsLaborOn the morning of October 28, 1915, a fire broke out in the basement of the St. John's parochial school on Chestnut Street in downtown Peabody. Six hundred children were inside. There were no exterior fire escapes. The wooden interior was fully engulfed in under five minutes.
Twenty-one girls between the ages of 7 and 17 were burned or crushed to death trying to escape. The cause was believed to be arson.
In the year that followed, Peabody became the first city in the United States to require by ordinance that every door in a public building open outward by push rather than by handle or knob. The reform spread to other cities and eventually into the national fire code. The crash bar on every public-building door in America today traces back, in part, to a school fire on Chestnut Street.
- 14
September 12, 1958 · Modern · 1920–1965
The North Shore Shopping Center opens to fifty thousand
InnovationOn September 12, 1958, the North Shore Shopping Center opened on Route 114 in Peabody, on the cleared site of the former Juniorate Seminary. Architect John Graham designed it as an open-air center anchored by Sears, Jordan Marsh, and Filene's, with a bowling alley, a movie theater, and a small amusement park.
More than 50,000 people came to the opening. Graham's open-air template, refined a year earlier in Seattle's Northgate, helped define the postwar American shopping center. North Shore was fully enclosed in 1972 to compete with the newer Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers. It remains one of the largest retail centers in New England and a defining economic engine of post-leather Peabody.
Figures · John Graham (architect)
Did you know
Surprising facts about Peabody.
- Civic Firsts
Queen Victoria offered George Peabody a baronetcy. He turned it down. She had a private portrait of herself painted for him instead, and it hangs today on Main Street in Peabody.
The portrait was Victoria's personal gift in thanks for the Peabody Donation Fund's London housing work. It hangs in the Peabody Institute Library, the same library George Peabody founded in his hometown in 1852.
Source · Peabody Group, Our History - Civic Firsts
George Peabody is the only American ever to be temporarily buried inside Westminster Abbey.
He was laid in the Abbey for thirty days in late 1869 by order of Queen Victoria and the Dean of Westminster, then sent home to Massachusetts aboard HMS Monarch, the Royal Navy's newest warship.
Source · Westminster Abbey, George Peabody - Labor
By 1919, Peabody produced more leather than any other city on Earth. Ninety-one separate tanneries operated inside the city limits.
A. C. Lawrence Leather alone processed two million hides, two and a half million calf skins, and four and a half million sheep and lamb hides a year by 1919.
Source · Peabody Leatherworkers Museum - Immigration
Walnut Street in Peabody was known for decades as Ottoman Street, after the Turkish and Kurdish leather workers who lived along it.
The community came from the Ottoman province of Harput, today Elazig in eastern Turkey. Their boarding houses and coffeehouses lined the street into the mid-20th century, an unusually large Muslim-majority immigrant cluster in an early-1900s New England mill town.
Source · Cambridge University Press, International Review of Social History - Civic Firsts
Every crash bar on every public-building door in America descends in part from a fire that killed 21 girls in downtown Peabody in 1915.
After the St. John's School fire on October 28, 1915, Peabody became the first city in the United States to require that all public-building doors open outward by push. The rule spread nationally.
Source · Fire Engineering - Immigration
By 1920, Peabody held one of the largest Greek American populations per capita of any city in the United States.
The first Greek residents, the Adrianos brothers from Sparta, arrived in 1897 to work the tanneries. Within twenty years the community had built a parish, a Greek-language school, and a network of businesses still anchored at St. Vasilios on Pierpont Street.
Source · St. Vasilios Greek Orthodox Church, Our Beginning - Education
The Peabody Institute Library, founded in 1852, is among the oldest public libraries in the United States to operate continuously from the same building.
George Peabody's $20,000 gift to South Danvers required only two things: that the library be free to everyone, and that it include a lyceum for public lectures. The original 1853 brick building on Main Street is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Source · Peabody Historical Society, Peabody Institute Library - Civic Firsts
Peabody is one of very few American cities to rename itself for a living person. The General Court approved the change on April 30, 1868. George Peabody died eighteen months later.
Source · Britannica, Peabody
The people
Figures from Peabody.
George Peabody (1795 to 1869)
Industrial · 1815–1880
Born in poverty in the South Parish of Danvers, Peabody became one of the richest men in the world as a London-based merchant banker, then gave most of his fortune away. He founded the Peabody Institute Library in his hometown, the Peabody Donation Fund in London (the first major social-housing trust in the world), the Peabody Education Fund for postwar Southern schools, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore (now part of Johns Hopkins), and the Peabody Museums at Yale and Harvard. He declined a baronetcy from Queen Victoria. His town renamed itself for him in 1868.
Arthur C. Lawrence (1855 to 1934)
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Founder of the A. C. Lawrence Leather Company in 1894, the firm that turned Peabody into the leather capital of the world. By 1909 his works employed more than 2,000 people across 32 buildings. The company would survive as a Swift and Company division until the mid-20th century, before the industry left the country.
Dimitrios and George Adrianos
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Brothers from Sparta who arrived in Peabody in 1897 to work the tanneries, becoming the first Greek residents of the city. The community they founded built St. Vasilios parish in 1906 and made Peabody one of the most concentrated Greek American populations in the country by 1920.
Othniel Charles Marsh (1831 to 1899)
Industrial · 1815–1880
Yale paleontologist and George Peabody's nephew. Marsh persuaded his uncle to fund the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in 1866, then used its resources to lead the great American dinosaur-hunting expeditions of the late 19th century. He named Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus.
Philemon Dickerson
Colonial · pre-1763
The first English tanner of record in what is now Peabody, granted land in 1639 to make tan pits and dress hides on the North River. His grant marks the start of three centuries of leather work on the same waterway.