Wenham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Wenham
From Agawam planting grounds by the Great Pond, to a village called Enon set off from Salem in 1643, to a lake whose ice was shipped around the world.
The Agawam and the Great Pond
Long before any English settler arrived, this land was home to the Agawam people, an Eastern Algonquian community whose numbers were cut by a severe epidemic around 1617. The pond at the center of town, later called Wenham Lake, was the heart of their world here. The claim did not simply vanish with settlement: in 1700, three grandchildren of the Agawam sachem Masconomet pressed a claim to the lands of Wenham, Beverly, and Manchester, and Wenham’s selectmen paid them three pounds and ten shillings for the quitclaim. Native artifacts turned up across town for generations afterward, and a collection is kept at the Wenham Museum.
Enon, and the Naming of Wenham
Around 1638 Salem’s minister Hugh Peters preached to a small group on a hill by the Great Pond, probably to encourage settlement, and the earliest land grants here date to about that time. Wenham was set off from Salem on May 10, 1643, and incorporated by the legislature on September 7, 1643, the first village laid out and made its own township from Salem. The first settlers called their village Enon, a biblical name, but when it was incorporated the legislature ordered that Enon be called Wenham, after a parish in Suffolk, England, from which some of the early settlers were said to have come. In the 1692 witchcraft trials, Sarah Good, who had been raised in Wenham, was among those tried and hanged, a hard chapter the town shares with its neighbors in Essex County.
A Vote for Independence
Wenham took the Revolution seriously for a town of its size. When the colonies were asked to raise Minute Men in 1774, Wenham was asked for fifteen, and its men marched with the Essex County militia and took part in the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was read aloud and approved by the town’s voters at a town meeting, the same gathering of ordinary residents that still votes the budget every spring. That year also brought a smallpox epidemic severe enough that the town set aside a special house for the sick and gave primitive inoculations to slow it.
The Ice That Traveled the World
In the nineteenth century Wenham found an unlikely export: ice. Ice cut from Wenham Lake in winter was so clear and clean that it became a prized commodity shipped around the world, and the hill where Hugh Peters had once preached was leveled to make room for the Wenham Lake Ice Company at the water’s edge. The town was farm country and shoe shops besides, doing piecework for the big factories in Danvers and Lynn, but it was the ice that carried the name Wenham around the globe.
The Iron Rail, and a Town That Kept Its Past
In 1909 the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick bought the Iron Rail property on Grapevine Road so his daughter Helen could run it as a country retreat for young women working New England’s mills. Helen Frick transferred it to the Girls’ Clubs of America in 1954, and in the 1970s the Town of Wenham bought the whole property, which it still owns and uses today. Wenham has guarded its history in the same spirit: in 1921 the Wenham Village Improvement Society bought the 17th-century Claflin-Richards House at the center of town, and the collection grew into the Wenham Museum, which opened in 1922 and was expanded in 1997. Gordon College, a private four-year college, has made its campus in town as well. The result is a small town that has worked, in its own words, for more than a century to keep its rural character while planning for what comes next.
Sources: Town of Wenham, Wenham History (wenhamma.gov/391/Wenham-History); the Wenham Museum; Wikipedia, Wenham, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.