North Andover, Massachusetts
A Short History of North Andover
From the Pennacook waters of Cochichewick, to the home of colonial America’s first published poet, to the mill town that split off from Andover and grew into a modern Merrimack Valley suburb.
Cochichewick, Before the Town
The land around the great pond the Pennacook called Cochichewick, meaning place of great cascades, drew English colonists in the mid-1640s. They settled the north parish of Andover here around 1646, farming the high ground above the water and building the first mills on the Cochichewick River. The pond that anchored the settlement is still the town’s protected drinking-water supply today, which is why so much of the land around it stays undeveloped.
Anne Bradstreet, America’s First Poet
One of those early settlers was Anne Bradstreet, who lived in what is now North Andover and died here in 1672. In 1650 her brother-in-law carried her manuscript to London and had it printed, making her the first poet published in colonial America, and one of the first published English-speaking women poets in the world. Her husband, Simon Bradstreet, later served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and set up one of the area’s first mills on the Cochichewick around 1644.
The Old Center and the Parson Barnard House
The village grew around the common at what is now the Old Center, with the meeting house of the North Parish at its heart. The Parson Barnard House, built in 1715 on land bought from Anne Bradstreet’s son Dudley, was long mistaken for Anne Bradstreet’s own home. It survives today as a museum run by the North Andover Historical Society, a window into how the town’s earliest families actually lived.
Mills, Money, and the Stevens Family
In the 1800s textile mills powered the village’s growth. The Stevens mill, founded in 1814, made the Stevens family central to local industry and to the town’s philanthropy for generations, and their estate at Osgood Hill still stands. The mills drew workers and money, and the north parish grew into a place with its own identity, distinct from the rest of Andover.
A Town of Its Own
In 1855 Andover split along its old parish lines, and the North Parish became the separate town of North Andover. The new town kept Town Meeting government, the New England way of deciding the budget and the bylaws in a room full of voters, and it holds onto that system to this day.
Modern North Andover
The 20th century brought a Catholic college, Merrimack, founded by the Augustinian order in 1947 on the Andover line, now one of the town’s largest institutions. As the mills faded, North Andover became a suburban town of about 31,000 people, still governed by Town Meeting and a Select Board, still protecting the lake at its center, and still telling the story of Anne Bradstreet, who wrote the first American poems on this ground.
Sources: North Andover Historical Society; Town of North Andover; U.S. Census Bureau.