History Overview
Marblehead, Massachusetts is a town unlike any in the entire United States. Amid the twisting streets that wind among the rocky headlands and out-croppings, there is a greater concentration of homes and buildings from America's colonial period (before 1775, when the Revolution began) than in any other town in America: nearly 300 houses survive from before that time of independence from Great Britain, and perhaps 200 more frames from the 1700s, and some from the 1600s, remain within houses that were remodeled in the 1800s. About 800 homes were built before 1840, within the new nation's first several decades, and of course many others date from the country's industrial period in the last half of the 1800s.
The name "Marblehead" is derived from the word "headland" - the rocky promontories that surround the harbor. The earliest English thought the headlands looked like marble from afar. In fact, the town was called Marble Harbor for a brief time in the 1630s.
At the peak of its commercial prosperity, the mid-1700s, Marblehead was among the ten largest towns in Britain's North American Colonies - a thriving commercial center based on a lucrative trans-Atlantic triangle trade in dried salt fish, primarily cod. Fish was sent down the Atlantic coast in exchange for wheat, tobacco, and other products - but was most often exported to the Caribbean West Indies and to the Catholic countries of Spain, France and Portugal, in exchange for commodities like salt for curing the fish, and a variety of products to trade with England, to bring back the English manufactured goods craved by local consumers.
Marblehead has been called "one of the most active and boisterous towns of 18th-century America." [Philip Chadwick Foster Smith] It was founded in 1629 as a commercial fishing enterprise. By 1660, in an official report to the new English king, it was acclaimed as "the greatest towne for ffishing in New England." Its earliest settlers were a unique group of non-conformist tradesmen and - most of all - fishermen, whose hardiness and grueling labor on the cold and stormy North Atlantic brought prosperity to the town in the 1700s. Wealthy merchants built stately homes and furnished them with luxury goods imported from England or commissioned from local craftsmen. In smaller abodes, rugged fishermen, intrepid seamen, skilled artisans, and large families (early visitors often remarked on the many children in the town) mixed together in the bustling colonial metropolis. A remarkable number of their smaller, more ordinary, early urban homes survive here. This rare survival of so many early dwellings is partially because the town's economy was ravaged by the Revolution, and for two centuries afterward, the prosperity that replaces everything old with new evolved sporadically at best.
The fishing industry gradually resumed after the Revolution and the War of 1812 ended, and eventually thrived in the 1820s and '30s. Historian Samuel Roads called 1839 the zenith of the fishing industry. Much happened in town during those relatively prosperous years, including the formation of a second community bank and the arrival of the railroad in 1837. Many new houses were built, and many earlier homes were remodeled. But, in relation to other towns and cities in the westward expanding nation, and compared to its pre-Revolutionary prominence, the town lacked the distinction it had once enjoyed.
The town's main industry changed from fishing to shoemaking after 1846, when a devastating gale destroyed half the fishing fleet; 65 men and boys lost their lives that day, leaving 43 widows and 155 fatherless children. Buildings large and small were involved in the shoe industry - whether 3- or 4-story factories, or so-called "10-footer" cottages where men hammered hard soles to leather uppers, or rooms in homes where women and girls sewed women's and children's shoes. Factory owners and other prosperous businessmen built larger and more elaborate houses in the later 1800s, and neighborhoods expanded beyond the older downtown sector. In the 1840s, shoe-stitching machinery was invented here that helped mechanize the industry, and the factory area around Pleasant Street was developed. Immigrants, especially from Nova Scotia, but from elsewhere too, came to work in the shoe factories - a less hazardous job than fishing.
Two great fires in the Pleasant Street area - in June 25, 1877 and December 25, 1888 - put an end to the shoe industry as well. An earlier fire, in 1866, was less destructive. By then, summer visitors began to transform the town into a seaside resort, with grand wooden hotels and summer residences ringing the harbor and Marblehead Neck, and sleek sailing yachts in the harbor. Most of those resort homes and buildings are gone, and the sailboats are smaller and more personal. But the town'’s welcoming aura, summer breezes, and beautiful harbor remain for all to enjoy.
After the second World War, Marblehead grew into a suburban "bedroom" community for Boston. The railroad ceased operating between Boston and Marblehead in 1959, and in the late 20th century, residents drove to a greater variety of surrounding areas.
Today, cozy bed-and-breakfasts, inviting restaurants, and enticing shops make a visit to Marblehead something to treasure. Many public parks offer stunning vistas of the harbor and offshore islands. From atop the rocky headlands, one can look out across the bay to Cape Ann and - farther to the right, or east - to the Atlantic Ocean. These very same views have been shared in centuries past by the Naumkeag Indians (part of the Abenaki Native American culture), by colonial fishermen & sailors, tradesmen & merchants, and Revolutionary soldiers & heroes.
To walk the winding streets of historic Marblehead is to be transported back through time.
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