Peabody, Massachusetts
A Short History of Peabody
From Naumkeag fishing grounds to the tanneries that made it the leather capital of America, and to the boy who left here and gave away a fortune. Peabody’s story is older and stranger than most people know.
Before the City
Long before there was a Peabody, this land belonged to the Naumkeag, one of the Pawtucket and Massachusett peoples who fished and farmed the North Shore. English colonists pushed inland from Salem starting in 1626, and for the next two centuries the future city was mostly farmland, the quiet back acreage of one of the oldest towns in New England.
From Salem to South Danvers
As Salem filled up, its farming edges broke away one by one. This corner became part of Danvers, then in 1855 set off on its own as the town of South Danvers. Thirteen years later, in 1868, the town did something unusual: it renamed itself for a living man, George Peabody, the banker born here in 1795 whose gifts were already famous on two continents. The city charter came later, in 1916.
George Peabody, the Namesake
George Peabody grew up with little and became one of the richest merchant bankers in Baltimore and London, then spent the back half of his life giving the money away. Historians often call him the father of modern philanthropy. He built housing for London’s poor, founded institutes and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, and endowed the Peabody museums that still carry his name at Harvard and Yale. The house where he was born is now the George Peabody House Museum, and a city naming itself after him was a small place telling the world to look at what one of its own had done.
The Tanner City
By the late 1800s Peabody tanned leather for the world, enough to earn the names Tanner City and Leather City. The work was hard, wet, and dangerous, and it pulled in wave after wave of immigrants: Irish, French-Canadian, Greek, Polish, Russian-Jewish, Turkish, and Armenian families who raised the churches, clubs, and triple-deckers you can still find today. In 1915 the Great Peabody Fire ripped through the leather district and burned much of it down. The city rebuilt, and the tanneries kept running deep into the twentieth century.
The Modern City
The tanneries died off after mid-century, and Peabody remade itself again, this time as the place the North Shore comes to shop, anchored by the Northshore Mall and the traffic of the Route 1 corridor. It stayed a city of neighborhoods and families through the change. It protected open land at city-owned Brooksby Farm, where you can still pick apples in the fall, and it took in new Brazilian, Dominican, and other immigrant families, running the same gateway it has run since 1626.
Sources: City of Peabody; Peabody Historical Society & Museum; George Peabody House Museum; U.S. Census Bureau.