How It Got Here
Newburyport History
A Town Created by an Argument
Newburyport exists because the people at one end of Newbury and the people at the other end could not run a town together. The act that separated them says so in plain words. On January 28, 1764 the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act erecting part of the town of Newbury into a new town by the name of Newburyport, and its opening lines explain the split: the inhabitants who dwell by the water side are mostly merchants, traders and artificers, the inhabitants of the other parts are chiefly husbandmen, and many difficulties and disputes have arisen in managing their public affairs. Governor Francis Bernard approved it on February 4, 1764.
The new town was the smallest in Massachusetts, 647 acres, with 2,800 people living in 357 homes. It had three shipyards, no bridges, and several ferries, one of which carried the Portsmouth Flying Stage Coach between Portsmouth and Boston. The area had been home to the Pawtucket people, and the first English settlement here dates to 1635, as part of what was then called Newberry Plantation.
The town prospered and became a city in 1851. Set at the mouth of the Merrimack, it was a fishing, shipbuilding and shipping center with a silverware industry beside it, and in 1844 Donald McKay introduced clipper ships here. The last square rigged ship built in Massachusetts was launched from Newburyport.
The Part That Is Harder to Read
The city’s own history page does not soften this, and neither will we. Newburyport captains took part in the triangular trade, importing West Indian molasses and exporting the rum made from it, and the distilleries stood around Market Square near the waterfront. Buying enslaved people in Massachusetts was illegal, but owning people purchased elsewhere was not, and the fine houses on High Street were staffed by enslaved African and Native people until the newly independent General Court abolished slavery during the Revolutionary War.
After the Revolution abolitionism took firm hold in this city. The National Park Service recognizes several Newburyport residents for their work on the Underground Railroad. William Lloyd Garrison, who became the most uncompromising voice of American abolition, was born in Newburyport and raised in its anti-slavery climate, and his statue stands in Brown Square, which was where abolitionist meetings were held. Both of those facts are Newburyport’s, and a student is owed both.
Fire, and Why Downtown Is Brick
In 1811 a major fire leveled the downtown. What came out of the rebuilding was a set of strict fire safety and building codes, and those codes are the reason the storefronts on State Street and around Market Square are brick rather than wood. The economic years that followed were hard ones: federal trade restrictions and the embargoes of the War of 1812, then the national financial panic of 1816, all landed on a city that lived on shipping.
The Decision That Saved the Downtown
By 1970 the historic downtown was scheduled to be razed and rebuilt with federal urban renewal money. That is what the plan called for and that is what most cities did. Newburyport residents organized against it, the city’s Redevelopment Authority voted in May 1969 to preserve Market Square instead, and the city signed a federal grant that let it keep most of its historic architecture. Renovation began in the early 1970s and turned the downtown and waterfront buildings into the brick and cobblestone center you can walk through today. It is one of the earliest cases in the country of renewal money going into saving a historic district rather than clearing it.
One more line for the record: in August 2012 Newburyport was designated an official Coast Guard City, in recognition as the service’s birthplace.
Sources
Settlement, incorporation, the 1764 act, the 1811 fire, the triangular trade, abolition and William Lloyd Garrison from the City of Newburyport’s own About Our City page. Clipper ships, the last square rigged ship, the Coast Guard City designation and the 1970s downtown renewal from the Greater Newburyport Chamber of Commerce and Industry history page. All read August 2026.
The government those decisions run through is on the next page.