North Shore · MA-06
Marblehead
Fishing port turned Revolutionary navy. The town that put Washington's army in the boats.
Overview
Marblehead was a Naumkeag fishing ground before it was an English town, a Cornish and Channel Islander outport before it was Yankee, and a deepwater cod port long before it was a yachting harbor. The same families that crewed Grand Banks schooners crewed John Glover's 14th Continental Regiment, the amphibious unit that evacuated Washington's army off Long Island in 1776 and rowed it across the Delaware to Trenton six months later. The Old Town that survives today, more than two hundred pre-1820 wood-frame houses packed onto a granite peninsula, is one of the largest intact colonial streetscapes in the country.
The moments
The sourced timeline.
- 01
Before English arrival · Colonial · pre-1763
The peninsula was Naumkeag fishing ground called Massebequash
Indigenous HistoryMaritimeBefore any European map named it Marblehead, the rocky peninsula on the north side of Salem Harbor was a seasonal fishing, shellfishing, and gathering place of the Naumkeag people, a Massachusett-speaking community within the wider Pawtucket and Pennacook networks of the coast.
Indigenous oral and recorded tradition names the place Massebequash, often translated as a reference to the great rocks of the headland. The Naumkeag presence preceded the English by thousands of years, and a formal land deed from the heirs of the sachem Nanepashemet to the town was not signed until 1684, more than half a century after the first English fishermen pitched camp.
Figures · Naumkeag people, Nanepashemet
- 02
1629 · Colonial · pre-1763
Cornish and Channel Islander fishermen settle the rocky harbor
MaritimeImmigrationEnglish settlement at Marblehead began around 1629, when fishermen from Cornwall and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey landed on the peninsula and built stages and flakes for splitting and drying cod. The early Marblehead population was working class, West Country English, and culturally distinct from the Puritan colony at neighboring Salem.
Marblehead was set off from Salem as a separate town in 1649. For more than a century its accent, its surnames, and its parish ties bent toward Cornwall and the islands rather than toward East Anglia. The town's claim to a distinct identity inside Massachusetts Bay traces directly to that founding generation of fish merchants and dorymen.
- 03
Eighteenth century · Colonial · pre-1763
Marblehead becomes one of the great Atlantic cod ports
MaritimeLaborBy the early 1700s Marblehead was one of the largest fishing ports in colonial North America, second only to Boston in tonnage along the Massachusetts coast. The fleet ran to the inshore banks and to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, salted cod on deck, and dried it on flakes lining the harbor.
Salt cod from Marblehead moved through Boston and Salem merchants into the West Indies, where it fed the enslaved labor force on the sugar plantations. That triangular trade built the merchant fortunes whose Georgian and Federal houses still line Washington and Hooper Streets, and it tied the town's prosperity to deep-water risk in ways that would shape its Revolutionary role.
- 04
September 5, 1775 · Revolution · 1763–1815
The schooner Hannah sails as the first armed vessel under Washington's commission
MaritimeVeteransCivic FirstsIn the summer of 1775 General George Washington, then commanding the new Continental Army outside Boston, leased a Marblehead-owned fishing schooner from Colonel John Glover, armed her, and put her into service against British supply traffic. The vessel was the Hannah. She was fitted out at Beverly, just across the harbor, and sailed on September 5, 1775 under Captain Nicholson Broughton, a Marblehead mariner, with a crew drawn largely from Glover's Marblehead Regiment.
Marblehead and Beverly have argued for two centuries over which town deserves the title Birthplace of the American Navy. The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command notes the dispute and the shared claim: the Hannah was a Marblehead-owned vessel, with a Marblehead captain and a Marblehead crew, commissioned and outfitted in Beverly Harbor. What is not in dispute is that she was the first armed vessel to sail under the authority of the new American commander in chief.
“A Marblehead-owned vessel, commanded by a Marblehead captain, with a crew comprised mainly of Marblehead men.”
U.S. National Archives, on the Hannah Figures · John Glover, Nicholson Broughton, George Washington
- 05
Night of August 29-30, 1776 · Revolution · 1763–1815
Marblehead fishermen row 9,000 men off Long Island in the fog
MaritimeVeteransOn the night of August 29, 1776, Washington's army of roughly 9,000 men was trapped on Brooklyn Heights with the East River at its back and Sir William Howe's British army to its front. The Continental Army's only chance was to vanish in the dark. The Marblehead Regiment, fishermen and dorymen by trade, took the oars.
Over a single fog-bound night Colonel John Glover's mariners ferried the entire army, with its horses, cannon, and supplies, across the river to Manhattan. Not one soldier was lost. By the time the fog lifted on the morning of August 30, the British found the Brooklyn lines empty. Historians have called the evacuation one of the most consequential small operations of the Revolution: without it, Washington's army is captured and the war likely ends in 1776.
“Bred to the sea.”
George Washington, on the Marblehead Regiment Figures · John Glover, Marblehead Regiment, George Washington
- 06
October 18, 1776 · Revolution · 1763–1815
Glover's brigade buys Washington the road to White Plains at Pell's Point
VeteransSix weeks after Long Island, John Glover was a brigadier in command of a small Continental brigade of about 750 men, including his own Marblehead Regiment, holding the road inland from Pelham Bay on the New York mainland. On October 18, 1776, General Howe landed roughly four thousand British and Hessian troops at Pell's Point intending to cut Washington's army off from its retreat north.
Glover used stone walls and a series of staged volleys to hold the British advance for most of a day. He gave ground deliberately, slowing the column long enough for Washington to pull the main army clear toward White Plains. American losses were small. British casualties have been estimated at several hundred. Pell's Point remains, with the Long Island evacuation and the Delaware crossing, one of the three Marblehead-led actions that kept the Continental Army intact through 1776.
Figures · John Glover, Marblehead Regiment
- 07
Night of December 25-26, 1776 · Revolution · 1763–1815
The Marblehead Regiment rows Washington across the Delaware to Trenton
VeteransMaritimeOn Christmas night 1776 the Marblehead Regiment did it again, in the snow. Glover's men, the 14th Continental Regiment, took roughly 2,400 soldiers, eighteen field guns, and their horses across the ice-choked Delaware River from McKonkey's Ferry to the New Jersey side in the middle of a freezing storm. By three in the morning the crossing was complete. By eight Washington had surprised the Hessian garrison at Trenton and the Revolution had its first clean victory.
The Marblehead Regiment was a notably integrated unit for its time, with mariners of African, Native American, Spanish, and Jewish background serving alongside English Marblehead families. They are the men in the boats in Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Figures · John Glover, Marblehead Regiment, George Washington
- 08
1824 · Revolution · 1763–1815
Lafayette returns to Marblehead and dances with John Glover's daughter
VeteransCivic FirstsDuring his celebrated 1824 to 1825 tour of the United States, the Marquis de Lafayette stopped in Marblehead to honor his old comrade John Glover, who had died in 1797. Town tradition records that Lafayette danced at a reception with Mary Glover Hooper, John Glover's daughter, who was then married into the Hooper merchant family whose mansion on Hooper Street still stands.
The visit threaded the Revolutionary generation into civic memory at exactly the moment when the men who had pulled the oars were dying off. Lafayette's stop was one of dozens he made across New England that year, and it remains a defining moment of the town's nineteenth-century relationship to its Revolutionary past.
Figures · Marquis de Lafayette, Mary Glover Hooper
- 09
September 19, 1846 · Industrial · 1815–1880
The Great Gale of 1846 kills sixty-five Marblehead fishermen in a single storm
MaritimeLaborOn September 19, 1846, a hurricane crossed the southeastern edge of the Grand Banks where the Marblehead fishing fleet was working. The wind hit in the afternoon and ran through the night. When the storm passed, eleven Marblehead schooners and sixty-five men and boys were gone.
The Marblehead Museum's count of the dead leaves forty-three widows and one hundred fifty-five fatherless children in a town of only a few thousand. Marblehead historians have called the Great Gale the death blow to the deepwater fishery: the fleet never fully rebuilt, and the next generation of Marbleheaders moved into shoe and leather work, coastal trade, and eventually summer business. The Lost at Sea Monument on Old Burial Hill, raised by the Marblehead Seamen's Charitable Society in 1848, marks the loss.
- 10
1876 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Archibald Willard's Spirit of '76 enters the American canon, with a Marblehead boy at the drum
Civic FirstsVeteransArchibald Willard, an Ohio painter, finished a large patriotic canvas titled Yankee Doodle in time for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The painting, three figures marching with fife and drums through battlefield smoke, became one of the most reproduced American images of the nineteenth century. It is now universally known as The Spirit of '76.
The model for the young drummer at the right of the painting was Henry Devereux of Marblehead, the teenage son of General John Henry Devereux. In 1880 the elder Devereux bought the original canvas and presented it to the town of Marblehead in memory of its men who had died in battle on sea and land. The painting has hung in the selectmen's room at Abbot Hall ever since, two blocks above the harbor where Henry grew up.
Figures · Archibald Willard, Henry Devereux, John Henry Devereux
- 11
1889 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Marblehead Race Week begins and the harbor becomes a summer yachting capital
MaritimeInnovationBy the last decades of the nineteenth century the Marblehead waterfront had shifted from a working cod port to a summer yachting harbor. Marblehead Race Week, established in 1889 and run jointly by the Eastern Yacht Club, Corinthian Yacht Club, and Boston Yacht Club, became one of the oldest continuous regattas in the United States.
The Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race, first sailed in 1905 and formalized in 1939 in partnership with the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, extended the town's reach across the Gulf of Maine. The summer fleet that arrives every July still threads through a harbor that two centuries earlier launched the schooners that built the cod trade.
- 12
1984 · Contemporary · 1965–today
Old Town: one of America's largest intact pre-Revolutionary streetscapes
Civic FirstsThe Marblehead Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, covers roughly 2,300 acres of the peninsula and contains nearly a thousand contributing buildings. More than two hundred of them were standing before the American Revolution. Among them are houses from the seventeenth century, working merchant homes, a Georgian Town House, and the Old North Church meeting house.
Two local historic districts established by Town Meeting in 1968, the Old Town and Gingerbread Hill districts, layer additional protection over the most architecturally dense part of the peninsula. The result is one of the largest intact concentrations of pre-1820 wood-frame architecture in the United States, and a working town that still uses these buildings as homes, shops, and civic spaces.
Did you know
Surprising facts about Marblehead.
- Civil Rights
The Marblehead Regiment that rowed Washington across the Delaware was one of the most integrated units in the Continental Army, with African, Native American, Spanish, and Jewish mariners serving alongside English Marblehead families.
Source · American Battlefield Trust - Veterans
On the fog-covered night of August 29, 1776, the Marblehead Regiment rowed roughly 9,000 men, with horses and cannon, off Long Island and across the East River to Manhattan without losing a single soldier.
Source · U.S. Naval Institute, Naval History Magazine - Maritime
The schooner Hannah, a Marblehead-owned fishing vessel under Marblehead captain Nicholson Broughton, was the first armed vessel to sail under the authority of George Washington as commander in chief, on September 5, 1775.
She was outfitted at Beverly Harbor, which is why Beverly and Marblehead have argued over the title Birthplace of the American Navy for more than two centuries.
Source · U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command - Civic Firsts
The young drummer in Archibald Willard's Spirit of '76, one of the most reproduced American paintings of the nineteenth century, was modeled on a Marblehead teenager named Henry Devereux.
Source · Marblehead Historical Commission - Maritime
The Great Gale of September 1846 took sixty-five Marblehead fishermen and eleven schooners in a single storm, leaving forty-three widows and one hundred fifty-five fatherless children in a town of only a few thousand.
Source · Marblehead Museum - Civic Firsts
Marblehead's Old Town contains more than two hundred wood-frame buildings that were standing before the American Revolution, one of the largest intact pre-1820 streetscapes anywhere in the United States.
Source · Marblehead Historical Commission - Immigration
Marblehead was settled around 1629 by fishermen from Cornwall and the Channel Islands, not by Puritans, giving the town a distinct West Country accent and identity inside Massachusetts Bay for more than a century.
Source · Town of Marblehead - Maritime
Marblehead Race Week, first run in 1889, is one of the oldest continuous sailing regattas in the United States and still draws roughly two hundred boats each July.
Source · Boston Yacht Club
The people
Figures from Marblehead.
John Glover
Revolution · 1763–1815
Marblehead merchant, born 1732, colonel of the 14th Continental Regiment and later brigadier general. The mariner Washington trusted with the army whenever the army needed to cross water.
Nicholson Broughton
Revolution · 1763–1815
Marblehead sea captain who commanded the schooner Hannah on her September 1775 sailing, the first armed vessel to put to sea under Washington's commission.
Jeremiah Lee
Revolution · 1763–1815
Colonel and Revolutionary-era Marblehead merchant whose 1768 Georgian mansion still stands as one of the most intact pre-Revolutionary merchant houses in New England.
Archibald Willard
Industrial · 1815–1880
Ohio painter, 1836 to 1918, whose 1876 Centennial canvas The Spirit of '76 became one of the defining patriotic images of the nineteenth century and was given to Marblehead in 1880.
Henry Devereux
Industrial · 1815–1880
Marblehead boy who modeled for the young drummer in Willard's The Spirit of '76. His father, General John Henry Devereux, purchased the painting in 1880 and donated it to the town.
Elbridge Gerry
Revolution · 1763–1815
Marblehead-born signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Constitution, governor of Massachusetts, and fifth Vice President of the United States under James Madison.