West Newbury, Massachusetts
A Short History of West Newbury
A town that spent decades arguing its way out of Newbury, a nineteenth-century comb-making center on the Merrimack, and the place that in 1952 elected the first African-American town Moderator in Massachusetts.
1819, and the Town That Left Newbury
West Newbury did not begin as a town. It began as the western farms of Newbury, and the people out there wanted their own town for decades before they got it. Newbury blocked the split again and again, until on February 18, 1819 the western district was finally incorporated, first under the name Parsons. A little over a year later, on June 14, 1820, it took the name West Newbury. English colonists had farmed the land since 1635, and around 1650 a thirty-acre tract around Indian Hill was bought from an indigenous man the records call Great Tom, for three pounds. That is the pattern for much of eastern Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that got big enough, and stubborn enough, to want its own vote.
The Comb Town
For much of the nineteenth century West Newbury made combs. Beginning in the 1840s, small home comb shops gave way to factories that cut combs and hair ornaments out of cattle horn, and for a time the town was one of the country’s centers for the craft. The largest of the works, the S.C. Noyes factory, closed in 1904. The industry left, but it is the reason a small farm town on the Merrimack once had a payroll and a place in the national market, and you can still find the trade in the town’s own records.
The Farms and the Hill
What the mills did not define, the land did. West Newbury sits on the south bank of the Merrimack River, and its high ground, Pipestave Hill, Indian Hill and Archelaus Hill, the highest point in town, has always been farm and orchard country. Long Hill Orchard, established in 1896, is still the town’s oldest continually operating farm. The town owns a good deal of that high ground on purpose: when the Cardinal Cushing Academy on Main Street closed, West Newbury bought the property, turned the classroom building into the Dr. John C. Page School, and kept the 270 acres around it, which is why the trails at Mill Pond and Pipestave Hill are public land today.
1952: A First in the Chair
Here is a piece of West Newbury history worth carrying with you. In 1952 the town elected Julian D. Steele as its Town Moderator, the first African-American town Moderator in Massachusetts. The Moderator is the person who runs Town Meeting, who recognizes speakers and calls the votes, which means West Newbury put a Black resident in charge of its most democratic room a dozen years before the Civil Rights Act. It is the kind of fact a town should know about itself.
2017: The Town Hired a Manager
The piece of West Newbury history that most directly affects how the town runs today is recent. In 2017 the Legislature passed West Newbury’s Town Manager Act, Chapter 97 of the Acts of 2017, and the town took on a professional Town Manager to handle the daily work under the direction of the elected Select Board. Angus Jennings became the first Town Manager in 2018 and served until he resigned in 2026, and the Select Board is running a search for a permanent successor while an interim manager keeps the town going. The trade was deliberate: one professional administrator, accountable to a board you do elect, and Town Meeting still holding the budget and the bylaws. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted.
Sources: Town of West Newbury Town Manager page and Town Manager Act, Chapter 97 of the Acts of 2017 (wnewbury.org/704/Town-Manager); Wikipedia, West Newbury, Massachusetts (History), with its cited town and census sources; U.S. Census Bureau.