Interior House Painter Beverly MA

Coordinates: 42°33′29″N 70°52′48″W / 42.558°N 70.880°W / 42.558; -70.880

Beverly, Massachusetts
City
Post Office in 1919
Seal
Motto(s):  Patri Simillima Proles (Latin) was “May we be as our children”
Location in Essex County and the state of Massachusetts.
Beverly, Massachusetts Location in the United States
Coordinates: 42°33′30″N 70°52′48″W / 42.55833°N 70.88000°W / 42.55833; -70.88000
Country	United States
State	Massachusetts
County	Essex
Settled	1626
Incorporated (town)	1668
Incorporated (city)	1894
Named for	Beverley, England
Government
• Type	Mayor-council city
• Mayor	Michael P. Cahill
Area
• Total	22.59 sq mi (58.50 km2)
• Land	15.09 sq mi (39.08 km)
• Water	7.50 sq mi (19.42 km2)
Elevation	36 ft (11 m)
Population  (2020)
• Total	42,670
• Density	2,827.70/sq mi (1,091.80/km)
Time zone	UTC−5 (Eastern)
• Summer (DST)	UTC−4 (Eastern)
ZIP Code	01915
Area code	978/351
FIPS code	25-05595
GNIS feature ID	0614200
Website	City of Beverly Official Web Site

Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, and a suburb of Boston. The population was 42,670 at the time of the 2020 United States Census. A resort, residential, and manufacturing community on the Massachusetts North Shore, Beverly includes Ryal Side, North Beverly, Montserrat, Beverly Farms and Prides Crossing. Beverly is a rival of Marblehead for the title of being the “birthplace of the U.S. Navy”

History

Native Americans inhabited what would become northeastern Massachusetts for thousands of years before European colonization of the Americas. At the time of contact in the early 1600s the area that would become Beverly was between an important Naumkeag settlement in present-day Salem and Agawam settlements on Cape Ann, with probable indigenous settlement sites at the mouth of the Bass River. During the early contact period virgin soil epidemics ravaged native populations, reducing the indigenous population within the present boundaries of Beverly from an estimated 200 to less than 50 if any survivors.

Europeans under Roger Conant’s leadership first colonized the area in 1626 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Initially part of Salem, Beverly would be set off and officially incorporated in 1668, when it was named after Beverley, the county town of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Surviving from the settlement’s early history is the Balch House, built, according to dendrochronological testing performed in 2006, about 1679.

English colonists did not initially seek permission from indigenous inhabitants to settle in Beverly, however when Charles II revoked colonial charters to establish the Dominion of New England in 1684, Beverly joined a number of Massachusetts municipalities in seeking out heirs to local sachems and paying them ex post facto in order to establish a right to the land. So it was that in 1686 the town selectmen agreed to pay six pounds, six shillings, and eight pence to three grandchildren of Masconomet, last sachem of the Agawam. They did not pay this sum until 1700.

The first ship commissioned for the US military, by the US Army (the US Navy had yet to exist), was the armed schooner USS Hannah under the command of Captain Nicholson Broughton. It was outfitted at Glover’s Wharf and first sailed from Beverly Harbor on September 5, 1775. For this reason Beverly calls itself the “Birthplace of America’s Navy.” (Marblehead makes a similar claim, in part, because Broughton was from there and belonged to the Marblehead Regiment. Additionally, official US Navy history and the naval history of Rhode Island contradict this.) The Hannah can be found on the patch of the city’s police department.

Beverly has been called the “birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution,” as the site of the first cotton mill in America (1787), and largest cotton mill of its time. The town is the home of one of the country’s first Sunday schools (which was built in 1810). Beverly was incorporated as a city in 1894.

In 1902, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation built a quarter-mile stretch of factory buildings in Beverly. The stretch was an early landmark example of reinforced concrete construction, devised by concrete pioneer Ernest L. Ransome. In 1906 it went into production. Closed in 1987, the complex was bought by Cummings Properties in 1996, and developed into a campus of hi-tech companies and medical offices. Parker Brothers, makers of Monopoly and other games, has offices in Beverly. The city is also home to the Landmark School, known worldwide for the education it provides for students with learning disabilities.

President William Howard Taft rented a house for the summer White House from Mrs. Maria Evans in Beverly. In the summers of 1909 and 1910, he lived in a house located at what is now the site of the Italian Garden in Lynch Park, the city’s principal public park, and in 1911 and 1912 he rented a different house a mile away, “Parramatta”, from Mrs. Robert Peabody. Beverly Hills, California, was named in 1907 after Beverly Farms in Beverly because Taft vacationed there.

Beverly has a former Nike missile site on L. P. Henderson Road, immediately east of the Beverly Municipal Airport. This site was in operation from March 1957 until August 1959, when the Army handed it over to the National Guard. It is now used by Beverly as a storage site and is under the scrutiny of many environmental organizations, as it and the surrounding areas—such as Casco Chemical—have polluted the groundwater, which could be potentially hazardous to the nearby Wenham Lake water supply.

In 1984, the deadliest arson fire in Massachusetts history occurred at the Elliott Chambers, a low-rent rooming house located on the corner of Rantoul and Elliott Streets in downtown Beverly. 15 people died as a result of the fire.