Mattapoisett, Massachusetts
A Short History of Mattapoisett
From land the Wampanoag knew as a place of resting, to a harbor that launched some 400 ships, to one of the last wooden whaleships ever built in the town.
A Place of Resting
Long before any English settler arrived, this land on the north shore of Buzzards Bay belonged to the Wampanoag. The town’s name comes from their language and is generally translated as a place of resting, a name older than any building or boundary in town. That word is still the first thing a visitor learns to say here, and it carries the memory of the people who lived on this coast for generations before the harbor filled with sailing ships.
1857, a Town of Its Own
Mattapoisett was settled in 1750 and for more than a century it was part of the older town of Rochester, one of its villages on the water. In 1857 the village separated and incorporated as Mattapoisett, a town in its own right. The line that marks Mattapoisett off from Rochester exists because residents decided it should, in the same form of open meeting that still votes the town’s budget every spring.
A Town Built on Ships
For more than a hundred years Mattapoisett lived by its harbor. From 1740 into the 1870s about 400 ships slid down the ways of the town’s shipyards on Buzzards Bay, built by hand from local oak and pine. Among them was the whaleship Acushnet, on which a young Herman Melville sailed and which he later drew on for Moby-Dick. The carriage of that trade, the skilled work of shipwrights and riggers, is the reason a small town on the bay was known far beyond it.
The Last of the Whaleships
As oil from the ground began to replace oil from whales, the whaling era wound down, and Mattapoisett built near its end. The Wanderer, launched from the town in 1878, is remembered as one of the last wooden whaling ships built here. Ned Point Light, the stone lighthouse raised at the mouth of Mattapoisett Harbor in 1837, still marks the entrance the shipwrights once sailed through, and the town keeps its maritime story at the Mattapoisett Museum.
Sources: Wikipedia, Mattapoisett, Massachusetts; the Mattapoisett Museum; U.S. Census Bureau.