Essex, Massachusetts
A Short History of Essex
From a fishing parish of Ipswich called Chebacco, to the town that built more two-masted wooden schooners than any other place, to a working shipyard that still launches wooden vessels on the Essex River today.
Chebacco Parish
English colonists first settled this stretch of the coast in 1634, when the land was part of Ipswich and was known as Chebacco Parish. For most of two centuries the people here worshiped, farmed, and above all built boats as a parish inside a larger town. In 1819 the parish was set off and incorporated as the separate town of Essex, about 26 miles north of Boston, taking its name from the English county of Essex. The vital records from before 1819 still live with Ipswich, a reminder of how recently Essex became a town in its own right.
The Shipbuilding Town
Essex built ships almost from the day it was settled, and it built them better and in greater number than anywhere else. Over its history the town launched more two-masted wooden fishing schooners than any other place, and for generations it was the leading supplier of schooners to the Gloucester fishing fleet just around Cape Ann. The trade peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century: by the 1850s, fifteen Essex shipyards were launching more than fifty vessels a year, most of them built for Gloucester. A whole town’s worth of skills, from the sawyers to the caulkers to the riggers, grew up around that riverfront.
A Living Trade
Most of the old yards closed as steel and engines replaced wood and sail in the twentieth century, but the craft never fully left Essex. The Story family boat yard, beside the Essex Shipbuilding Museum, still builds and launches classic wooden ships in the Essex tradition, which is why the riverfront is not a museum piece but a working waterfront. That is also why what Town Meeting decides about the river and its banks still matters to a trade that is very much alive.
The Fried Clam
Essex sits on the Great Marsh, and the clam flats of the Essex River have fed the town for as long as it has existed. In the summer of 1916 an Essex clam-shack owner named Lawrence Woodman, known to everyone as Chubby, first dropped a shucked clam into hot fat, and the fried clam was born. Woodman’s of Essex still serves them on the same road, and clamming and the shellfish that support it remain a part of daily life and of town business, which is why residents still argue over the flats at Town Meeting.
Keeping the Story
The Essex Historical Society, founded in 1937, keeps the record of all of this, and since the 1970s it has run the Essex Shipbuilding Museum on Main Street. The museum restores and interprets the schooners and boats built on the Essex River, and it is one of the clearest windows in Massachusetts into how an entire town organized itself around a single craft. It is a good first stop for a student who wants to understand where the town came from.
Sources: Town of Essex, About Essex and Essex History Resources (essexma.org); the Essex Shipbuilding Museum, run by the Essex Historical Society (essexshipbuilding.org); Historic Ipswich, Building a Ship in Essex; Wikipedia, Essex, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.