Nahant, Massachusetts
A Short History of Nahant
From cattle pasture on the edge of Lynn, to a fashionable summer colony for Boston, to the smallest town in Massachusetts by land area, still settling its business in an open Town Meeting.
An Island of Lynn
English colonists first put the peninsula to use in 1630, when servants of Isaac Johnson grazed his cattle on the grass that runs out to the sea. For more than two hundred years Nahant was not its own town at all: it was a part of Lynn, reached across a long sand bar that the tide could cover. That geography shaped everything that followed. A place joined to the mainland by a single causeway thinks about roads, water, and the sea in a way an inland town never has to.
A Town of Its Own, 1853
Nahant separated from Lynn and was incorporated as its own town on March 29, 1853. It remains one of the smallest municipalities in the Commonwealth, and with about one square mile of land it is the smallest by area of any town in Massachusetts. The name is older than the town, and its meaning is not settled: it has been read as at the point and as twin islands, and it may carry the name of a person the earliest colonists met here. Small as it is, Nahant runs the full machinery of a Massachusetts town, an open Town Meeting where every registered voter is a member, a Board of Selectmen, and a Town Administrator.
The Summer Town
In the nineteenth century Nahant became a fashionable summer resort, a cool and breezy escape for wealthy Boston families. The ice merchant Frederick Tudor, the man who built a fortune shipping New England ice around the world, kept a summer estate here that is now the Nahant Country Club, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was among the summer residents. The grand hotels and cottages of that era, and landmarks like the coastal overlook at Forty Steps, gave the town a second life each summer that it has never entirely lost.
East Point
The rocky headland at the peninsula’s eastern tip, East Point, has carried the town’s biggest decisions. During the Second World War it held a coastal artillery battery guarding the approach to Boston Harbor. After the war the land passed to Northeastern University, which built its Marine Science Center there. In May 2021 Nahant’s open Town Meeting voted to take about twelve acres of that oceanfront land by eminent domain for conservation and public use, and to borrow to help pay for it. The dispute that followed reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which heard arguments in February 2026. It is a reminder that in this town the biggest questions still go to a room full of residents with their hands raised.
Sources: Wikipedia, Nahant, Massachusetts; the Nahant Historical Society (nahanthistory.org); U.S. Census Bureau.