Merrimac, Massachusetts
A Short History of Merrimac
From a riverside parish of Amesbury, to a town that voted itself into being in 1876, to carriage shops whose work was known around the world.
Swift Water
The name Merrimac comes from a Native American word meaning swift water place, the same root as the Merrimack River that runs along the town’s northern edge. Long before any English town lines were drawn, the river was the organizing fact of life here: it set the border, powered the mills, and carried the trade. When you stand on the north side of Merrimac you are looking at the water the town is named for.
West Amesbury
Merrimac was settled in 1638, but for more than two centuries it was not a town at all. It was the western parish of Amesbury, and before that part of Salisbury, and its residents did their public business as a corner of a larger place. People called it West Amesbury. A parish could run its own church and school, but the big decisions, the roads and the money and the vote in the General Court, belonged to the town it was attached to. That distance is what eventually pushed West Amesbury to ask for a town of its own.
A Town of Its Own, 1876
On April 11, 1876, the Massachusetts legislature set the western parish off from Amesbury as the separate town of Merrimac. That act is the reason there is a Merrimac Town Meeting at all: it gave the parish its own warrant, its own officers, and its own vote on its own budget, the same open Town Meeting that still runs the town today. A town line on the map is easy to take for granted. This one exists because the people who lived here decided they wanted to govern themselves.
The Carriage Town
Through the nineteenth century Merrimac became known worldwide for one thing: horse-drawn carriages. Its shops built coaches and wagons of a quality that carried the town’s name far beyond a place this size would suggest, and the carriage on the town seal, above the date 1876, is there because of that trade. The Victorian brick storefronts that still line Merrimac Square went up in those years, when the carriage industry was the center of the town’s working life.
Hard Years, Told Plainly
Two facts belong in an honest history of Merrimac. The first is that the carriage industry did not last: in the early twentieth century, as manufacturing left New England and the automobile replaced the carriage, the trade that built the town faded, and Merrimac had to remake itself as the quieter residential town it is now. The second is older. A 1771 record documents at least four enslaved Africans held by residents of this area, part of the history of slavery in Massachusetts before the state’s courts ended it. Neither fact is comfortable, and both are true, and a town that knows its own history keeps them in view.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Merrimac, Massachusetts”; Town of Merrimac records; U.S. Census Bureau.