During the end of the last ice age, 10-12,000 years ago, New England was covered by a large glacier. A huge block of melting ice was so heavy that it formed a depression.

In 1635, a small band of settlers landed at the northern edge of the Parker River in present day Newbury. They had been persuaded to leave Boston to help establish the northern boundary of Massachusetts Bay Colony against rival claims.

By the third quarter of the 18th century, “Newbury Port” had become the center of New England shipbuilding. Between 1756 and 1765, 427 Newbury-built vessels entered Customs at Salem or Boston.

By 1790 Newburyport began to recover from the aftereffects of the Revolution. Between 1791 and 1794, the value of Newburyport’s exports doubled from $250,000 to $495,000.

The trilogy of fateful events that welcomed Newburyport to the 19th century – embargo, fire, and war – could hardly foretell a century of astounding progress and wealth, marked by a period of modernization and an embrace of the industrial age.

Newburyport merchants began to sail for China, Burma, and India more regularly, and were gone for longer periods of time. Like the whaling wives of Nantucket and New Bedford, Newburyport’s merchant wives began to desire to travel with their husbands, and to make a home at sea.

Founded in 1786, The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was established to aid ships in distress, and rescue survivors of shipwrecks. The first lifeboat station was established at Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1807.

Archaeological excavations in Newburyport, along the Merrimack (Molodemak in Abenaki), unearthed an Archaic period assemblage confirming thousands of years of occupation.

Newburyport was geographically well-suited to become one of America’s premier early ship building centers. The town’s location along the Merrimack River provided access to the forests of New Hampshire and Maine.

McKay moved to Newburyport in 1841 and opened his own shipyard – Currier and McKay – which allowed him some freedom to experiment with his own ship designs.

Once Massachusetts fully abolished slavery in 1783, black sailors would have been a mainstay in a maritime port city like Newburyport; the 1820 census, for example shows almost 100 black residents, compared to 10 in Newbury.

Among many “firsts” associated with Newburyport’s many shipyards was the building and launching of the first US Revenue Cutter in 1791 – the USRC Massachusetts – from the yard of Searle and Tyler, near today’s Waterfront Park. The US Coast Guard considers this to be the first ship launched into its service...

The Dreadnought, one of the most famous ships of the 19th century, was built in the Currier & Townsend Shipyard at the foot of Ashland Street, in 1853. The ship was employed in the North Atlantic trade between New York and Liverpool.

Daniel I. Tenney (1800-1881), a native of Newburyport, was a successful jeweler and generous benefactor to his beloved hometown.  He is memorialized as a figurehead from his namesake ship, constructed in 1875 in Newburyport.

During Newburyport’s merchant heyday in the mid-19th century, her captains visited every corner of the globe, returning with exotic cargos and souvenirs that bespoke her global reach.