Ipswich, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ipswich
Eleven thousand years of people at Bull Brook, a town meeting in 1687 that told a royal governor no, the largest stocking mill in the country, and a vote in 1903 that put the power lines in the town’s own hands.
Before It Was Ipswich
People have lived on this ground for a very long time. The Bull Brook site, identified here in 1951, produced some of the oldest evidence of human life in New England, carbon dated to roughly nine to eleven thousand years before the present, and the stone tools and shell heaps found since fill in the ten thousand years after that. When English colonists arrived they found a Native settlement on the bay and wrote its name down three different ways: Agawam, Aggawom, Angoam. Masconomet, the sachem of that country, was entertained aboard the Arbella on June 12, 1630, and John Winthrop recorded the meeting in his journal the next day without saying how they got past the language barrier.
The record of what happened next is thin in one place and plain in another. There is no account of Native resistance at Agawam. There is documentation of epidemics that swept Indigenous communities in this area around 1617 and again in 1633, and of ghost towns the early English settlers walked into. In 1638 Masconomet signed a contract with John Winthrop the Younger transferring Ipswich for wampampeage, other goods, and twenty pounds. Winthrop the Younger and twelve men had sailed into the harbor in 1633. Agawam was incorporated as Ipswich on August 5, 1634, and named for Ipswich in Suffolk, England.
1687: The Vote on the Town Seal
This is the piece of Ipswich history the town put on its own seal, and it is the reason a civics guide starts here. In 1686 the Crown abolished the Massachusetts charter and installed Sir Edmund Andros as governor of a new Dominion of New England, with no elected assembly. On August 22, 1687, Andros announced a property tax. On August 23 the men of Ipswich met and voted that no taxes shall be levied upon the Subjects without consent of the Assembly chosen by the Freeholders. The Reverend John Wise of the Chebacco parish had spoken first and moved the room to it.
The government answered. Six men, Wise, John Andrews, John Appleton, Robert Kinsman, William Goodhue Jr. and Thomas French, were arrested that September and tried in Boston, and each was fined, Wise the heaviest at a hundred pounds. Samuel Appleton was held four months for refusing to post bond. Andros was recalled to England in 1689 and the new sovereigns, William and Mary, issued the colonists another charter. In 1895 the artist Arthur Wesley Dow designed the town seal Ipswich still uses, and gave it the motto The Birthplace of American Independence 1687. That is eighty-nine years before the Declaration, and the argument in the two documents is the same one.
Lace, Stockings and the Mills
The clipper ships of the nineteenth century went to the deep water at Salem, Newburyport and Boston, and Ipswich stayed a farming and fishing town living in houses it could not afford to replace. That is why so much early architecture is still standing here. What the town made instead was cloth. Ipswich lace, produced as a cottage industry, is the only hand made bobbin lace known to have been made commercially in the United States. In 1822 a stocking machine smuggled out of England, against a British ban on exporting the technology, arrived in Ipswich, and the town became a mill town. In 1868 Amos A. Lawrence opened the Ipswich Hosiery Mills in the old stone mill on the Ipswich River, using its water power, and by the turn of the century it was the largest stocking mill in the country.
The mills brought people. English, Irish, Nova Scotian, French Canadian, Polish and Greek families came to work in them and then moved into everything else, and their descendants are here now.
1903: The Town Bought the Lights
At the spring town meeting of 1903 the town voted 307 to 68 to build a municipal electric light plant. Turbines went into the municipal utility building on High Street, and on the night of Wednesday, November 18, 1903, the dynamo started and the streets throughout the town were lit. More than a century later the power in an Ipswich house still comes from a utility the town owns, run by commissioners who are the five Select Board members the town elects.
That ownership has put some very large questions on the Town Meeting floor. In 1970 MEPP Inc., an organisation of 29 Massachusetts municipal electric departments, proposed building a nuclear generating plant at the end of Town Farm Road, on the site of the old town dump, arguing that the shallow bedrock and the cold water suited it. The 1971 Ipswich Town Meeting defeated the proposal. In 2010 the town’s voters approved a wind turbine on that same ground, and a special town meeting in 2011 approved a second one, with 72 percent of those in the hall voting yes.
1967: The Charter You Live Under
Ipswich reformed its government in 1950 by accepting a Town Manager charter. The voters then rescinded it, regained it, and lost it again. The charter in force now was enacted as Chapter 620 of the Acts of 1966 and accepted by vote of the town on March 13, 1967, and the Legislature has amended it many times since, most recently by Chapter 71 of the Acts of 2025.
The trade that charter made is worth understanding, because it decides what is on your ballot. Offices that Ipswich used to elect became appointments: the Board of Health, the Cemetery and Park Commissioners and the Town Clerk are all named in the charter as offices that reverted to appointment by the Town Manager. What voters kept is short and it is powerful: the Select Board, the Moderator, a constable, the School Committee and the Housing Authority. Everything else runs through people those five bodies hire. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is exactly the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a charter is amended the same way it was adopted.
The History the Town Keeps
The Ipswich Museum holds the town’s collections and its historic houses. Historic Ipswich, an independent archive the town links from its own history page, publishes the deeds, the photographs and the house histories with sources attached, which is why several of the dates on this page can be checked twice. The town also keeps a Historical Commission and an Architectural Preservation District Commission, and both are seats a resident can hold.
Sources: Town of Ipswich, History (ipswichma.gov/493); Ipswich Electric Light Department, History (ipswichma.gov/799); Town of Ipswich Charter, Chapter 620 of the Acts of 1966 as amended (ecode360.com/15404681); Historic Ipswich, Birthplace of American Independence; Wikipedia, Ipswich, Massachusetts, with its cited sources.