Danvers, Massachusetts
A Short History of Danvers
From the Salem Village where the witch trials began, to the township a king disallowed, to the busy North Shore town of today.
Salem Village, 1692
Before it was Danvers, this was Salem Village, a farming settlement on the edge of Salem town. In 1692 it became the place where the Salem witch trials began, in the home of the village minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris. Among the accused was Rebecca Nurse, who at 71 was convicted and executed that July. Her farmhouse, the Rebecca Nurse Homestead at 149 Pine Street, built around 1678, still stands and is open to visitors. It is one of the most direct links any Massachusetts town has to the year 1692.
The King Unwilling
Salem Village and Salem’s Middle Precinct, today’s Peabody, wanted to govern themselves. In 1752 the province set the two off from Salem as a district with a new name, Danvers, and in June 1757 it passed an act making Danvers a full town. On August 10, 1759, King George II and his Privy Council disallowed that act, as the council’s minutes record, and the Danvers Archival Center tells the whole story. The decree appears never to have reached Massachusetts, and Danvers went on governing itself through its Town Meeting and sending representatives to the General Court. In 1893 Town Meeting created the town seal and put on it the words “The King Unwilling,” and they ride on the seal today beside “Incorporated 1757.” The Secretary of the Commonwealth dates its incorporation as a town to 1775.
A Town of Estates and Institutions
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Danvers filled with the houses of prominent families, several of which survive: the Samuel Holten House from 1670, the Page House from 1754, and Glen Magna Farms, an estate dating to about 1790, whose delicate Derby Summer House was built in 1794. The town raised its handsome Town Hall in 1855 and its Peabody Institute Library’s present building dates from 1892. Together these buildings turned Danvers into a place that keeps its own past close at hand.
The Asylum on the Hill
In 1878 the state opened the Danvers State Hospital on Hathorne Hill, a vast asylum built on the Kirkbride plan, a design meant to treat mental illness with light, air, and order. For more than a century its towers loomed over the town. The hospital shaped Danvers for generations as an employer and a landmark, and its story is a reminder that big public institutions leave a long mark on the communities that host them.
Green Space and Modern Danvers
Danvers also chose to keep land for its residents. Endicott Park, a former estate, is now a public park with trails, an orchard, and a barn with farm animals, the kind of place a family can spend a whole afternoon for free. The town gives its size two ways: 165 acres on its Endicott Park page, and 140 acres for the town-owned Endicott Estate on its historic sites page. Today Danvers is a settled North Shore town of about 28,000 people, still governed the old New England way by Town Meeting and a Select Board, still living alongside the sites of 1692, and still carrying a motto that started with a king’s refusal.
Sources: Town of Danvers; Rebecca Nurse Homestead; Danvers Historical Society; U.S. Census Bureau.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 15, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Danvers, Danvers Archival Center, The Creation of Danvers, as of July 2026.
- Town records: Town of Danvers, Historic Sites Accessible to the Public, as of December 2025.