The Town of Ipswich is updating the Town’s Community Development Plan (CDP), a long-range plan to guide the community’s physical evolution. The Town would like your input to help determine goals and priorities.
Imprinted into the rocks in front of the First Church in Ipswich is the footprint of the devil, left there forever in a legendary encounter with the traveling English evangelist George Whitefield in 1740.
The Old North Burying Ground on High Street in Ipswich was established in 1634 upon the founding of the town, and is one of the oldest cemeteries in North America.
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.
The landscape surrounding Strawberry Hill on Jeffreys Neck Rd. invokes a time when saltwater farms were common in Ipswich, Across the street is Greenwood Farm and the First Period Payne House, owned by the Trustees of Reservations.
In 2005 EBSCO Publishing commissioned artist Alan Pearsall to paint a 2,700-square-foot mural on one of the old mill buildings occupied by the company in Ipswich. The mural is the centerpiece of the town’s Riverwalk.
During the Salem witch trials the Ipswich jail was filled with the accused. Elizabeth Howe of Linebrook Road was tried and hung. The ministers of the town opposed the trials as a delusion.
Photos of houses and tombstones of the early inhabitants of Ipswich, with maps of the lots and land grants given to the settlers.
The contiguous historic neighborhoods of Meeting House Green, High Street, the East End, and the South Green present the town’s original settlement pattern and offer well-preserved streetscapes of 17th to 19th-century private residences.
When the Town of Ipswich was established, ownership of a house and land within the town bounds carried with it the right of pasturage beyond the Common Fence. In 1788, the commoners resigned all their land interests to pay the heavy town debt incurred during the Revolution.
Grape Island was once a small but thriving community, and briefly a popular summer resort. In 1941, 3000 acres of Plum Island including Grape Island were purchased by the U.S. government to establish the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.
The town voted in 1861 to build County Street and its stone arch bridge, connecting Cross and Mill Streets. A Woolen mill, saw mill, blacksmith shop and veneer mill operated near the bridge.
The earliest recorded sighting of a Sea Serpent in North American waters was at Cape Ann in 1639. In 1817, reports spread throughout New England of a sea serpent sighted in Gloucester Harbor.
The Ipswich Town Landing is one of several locations along the River where wharves were located over the centuries.
In the late eighteenth century, Ipswich had 600 women and girls producing more than 40,000 yards of lace annually. In the 1820’s Ipswich industrialists opened a factory and imported machines from England to mechanize and speed up the operation, which destroyed the hand-made lace industry.
In 1737, Captain Nathaniel Treadwell opened an inn in the house still standing at 12 N. Main St. The second Treadwell’s Inn stands at 26 N. Main St. Guests at the two inns included John Adams, President Monroe, Daniel Webster and the Marquis de LaFayette.
The second jail in the Colony was erected in Ipswich in 1656. Sixteen British prisoners were kept hostage in the cold and cruel stone jail during the War of 1812. A large brick House of Corrections was constructed in 1828 at the site of the present Town Hall on Green Street.
The frame of a 1692 house that once stood at the intersection of Manning and High Streets in Ipswich is on display in the “Art of the Americas” wing at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Massachusetts men played a conspicuous part in the French and Indian War, which resulted in wholesale destruction and deportation in French-speaking Nova Scotia. Surviviors were exiled to the Colonies, their children taken from them and distributed to English families as “nothing more than slaves.”
Newcomers and visitors to Ipswich inevitably suggest installing a traffic light at the confusing intersection of Market, Central, North Main and South Main Streets, but most people agree it would be a bad idea.
