On the Massachusetts North Shore
March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams to John Adams: "In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, this is a letter to the Atlanta Journal from my father David Aubren Harris, a Mississippi native, in support of President Truman's civil rights initiatives. He received a vicious racist letter in response.
On January 12, 1912, the labor protest later known as the "Bread and Roses" strike began in Lawrence, MA. Violent methods were used to suppress the protest, but the strikers maintained their solidarity.
In 1773, the selectmen ordered all houses where the disease had appeared to be closed, and dogs to be killed immediately. The fears of the inhabitants increased when permission was granted to build a smallpox hospital on Cat Island.
An estimated 1,500 cases of the so-called "Spanish flu in Ipswich resulted in at least 66 deaths. It is believed that the country reached herd immunity after the virus mutated to a less lethal variant. By the end of the pandemic, the average life expectancy had been shortened by 12 years!
The Bay Circuit Trail in Ipswich enters Willowdale State Forest and continues north through the town-owned Dow-Bull Brook preservation land. A branch continues from Willowdale through Bradley Palmer S.P to New England Biolabs.
Teddy Roosevelt, a grandstanding performer with plenty of rhetoric but fewer accomplishments, campaigned from the caboose of a train in New England.
On December 1, 1722, Daniel Rogers was returning to Ipswich from a court case in Hampton and took a wrong turn that led deep into Salisbury marshes. His body was found a few days later near Salisbury beach. Suspicion fell on one Moses Gatchel but no charges were filed, there being a lack of solid evidence.
Three gales of unequaled fury and destructiveness swept along our coast carrying desolation and death in their stormy pathway, and overwhelming many families in the deepest mourning.
The long and productive life of Frank Geist lends credence to the maxim that character is fate and renders his a story is worthy of telling.
In 1963 Charles F. Haywood published the Yankee Dictionary, dedicated to his parents “both of whom loved Old New England, its life, its people, its history, its customs and its speech.”
Summer Street may be the oldest public way in Ipswich, and in the earliest days of the settlement was called Stony Street, Annable's Lane, or simply "The Way to the River. "
Nancy Virginia Weare spent 33 years at her family's summer camp at Plum Island. In 1993, after Nancy retired, she wrote "Plum Island: The Way It Was."
The Rev. Joseph Dana served the Second Congregational Church at the South Green from 1765 until his death in 1827 at age 85. Rev, Dana's tombstone in the Old South Cemetery reads: "In memory of the Rev Joseph Dana D.D., for sixty-two years, Minister of the South Church. His protracted life was eminently devoted to… Continue reading The Boy Who Fell Beneath the Ice
"Most of them had pea and bean porridge, sometimes hasty pudding, both morning and evening. A lady of eighty, after having partaken of Thanksgiving dainties, was heartily glad to return home and set a meal of her favorite broth."
Every day Charlotte Lindgren boarded at Ipswich Depot for her commute to Boston and back. On February 28, 1956, she was unfortunate to be in two horrible train crashes in the same morning, but survived them both unscathed.
Historic Ipswich 