Quick History Stops: Ipswich, MA, Part 2

Earlier this year, I visited many historic places along the North Shore in Essex County, Massachusetts. I found so many quick history stops in Ipswich, MA that I have turned this adventure into a four-part miniseries. Part 1 covered a pair of banks, a post office, murals on a factory building, and a story from the Industrial Revolution. Part 2 will focus on the Riverwalk, a war memorial, the town visitor center, a commercial block, and other historic buildings.

Not far from the historic murals is the entrance to Downtown Riverwalk, a pedestrian bridge over the Ipswich River where visitors can see the red brick mill buildings, a man-made waterfall, and a fish ladder. Informational signage beside the path explained that Puritan colonial settlers built the oldest dam in 1637, and the dams have grown steadily bigger over time. The river was originally wider in this area, but a portion was filled in to built the current mills. As for bridges, the oldest permanent structure to cross the river was made of wood in 1647. This has long since been replaced by the stone Choate Bridge, which will be featured in a future post. While multiple pedestrian bridges were built over the years, the current Riverwalk bridge dates from 2006.

While I did not have the chance to go inside Ipswich Museum during this trip, a sure stop for a future visit to the area, I did take pictures of its three historic buildings. The oldest was Whipple House, a restored timber-frame First Period building. Captain John Whipple constructed the original portion of the building for his family in 1677, which included his wife, six children, and a Native American man who was enslaved during King Philip’s War, also known as Metacom’s War. Others repeatedly enlarged the house during the 17^th and 18^th century. Ipswich Historical Society, the precursor to Ipswich Museum, has owned the house since 1898 and added it to the National Register of Historic Places in 1960.

The Heard House is the main building on the Ipswich Museum campus. John Heard built the Federal style mansion around 1800, which has belonged to the museum since the 1930s. The prolific actor John Heard, buried in Ipswich and best known by my generation as Kevin's Dad in Home Alone, is the third-great-grandson of the mansion builder. With the exception of a George Washington Heard, the son of the original John, they were Johns all the way down. The third building on the property was tiny Alexander Knight House with an informational sign dense enough to be a textbook. The story associated with the house was bizarre and tragic. While young Alexander was well-off, his baby son Nathaniel died in a house fire in 1641, leading the local court to charge Alexander with the modern equivalent to negligent homicide. Since he could no longer live in town, he was permitted to built a small but nice house at the edge of the community.

Down the street from the trio of houses was the Ipswich War Memorial, which listed most wars in United States history using specific vocabulary, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the “Campaign Era” including the Philippine-American War and annexation of Puerto Rico, World War I, World War II, the Korean “Conflict”, and the Vietnam “Conflict”. More space was left on the stone for future wars, perhaps because the “War on Terror” has yet to be concluded.

According to town historian Gordon Harris, the bright red visitor center building on 36 South Main Street is Hall-Haskell House with its oldest part built in 1819 or 1820. In the book Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by Thomas Franklin Waters, the author noted that marinar Charles Hall Jr. bought the land upon which the house would be built and gave it to “the widow Mary Hall and others”, with Harris listing the “others” as another widow, Sarah Rust, who had previously sold land in 1792. In 1825, they sold the property to Eunice Haskell, and her son expanded the property after her death. One of the John Heards bought the property — specifically John Leeds Heard, the great-grandson of the mansion builder — and his widow lived there until the Town of Ipswich purchased the property.

Moving towards the center of town, I passed Shoreborne Wilson House, a building on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980. Shoreborne was the unique first name of the barrelmaker who built the house between 1685 and 1692. Not far away was The District, a building that has seen many uses. The short-lived Unitarian Church built a classic Greek Revival style building in 1833, and the town bought the building for a Town Hall in 1843. The building was raised to add a first floor and a big addition in back in 1876. The Town Hall offices have since moved, and the building has held condos since a restoration in 2017.

Finally, after passing over Choate Bridge, I came to the center of town complete with its own very confusing intersection. Caldwell Block is the oldest commercial building in Ipswich and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983. The Italianate style building gets its name from Luther Caldwell whose gravestone with extensive information was highlighted in the first part of this miniseries. The building continues to hold a number of local businesses.