Along the River: The North End Shipyards

The state's historic inventory lists this park, and the city named it in 1944 for Mayor Michael Cashman; it is now the gateway to the rail trail that follows the old railroad line out of town. The river in front of you is the reason for the walk. Emery says the first ferry across the Merrimack was at Carr's Island, upstream and to your left, and that the first building yards were there. Currier's 1906 History records that in 1810 alone twenty-one ships, thirteen brigs and a schooner were built on this river, and he quotes a newspaper of May 1820, when more than forty vessels, held in port for a week by easterly winds, sailed together at noon: “We believe our river never was whitened with so much canvas at one time as was spread yesterday noon; it was a delightful sight.” The yards that built them lay along the bank you are about to walk, from here to Ashland Street.

Sources: MACRIS inventory form · Emery, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (1879), p. 225 · Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), p. 453

This was a gun factory before it was a silver factory. Currier's History of 1906 says the brick building at the foot of Broad Street was “erected in 1866 by the Merrimack Arms and Manufacturing Company,” and the state inventory form adds that by 1872 it belonged to the Brown Manufacturing Company. Currier traces the silversmiths from 1857, when Anthony F. Towle and William P. Jones, as Towle & Jones, began making silver ware behind No. 8 Merrimac Street; they moved to Middle Street, took in Edward B. Towle in 1870, and parted in 1873. The Towle Manufacturing Company, organized in 1880, bought this building in 1883 and, Currier says, had occupied it ever since; by 1906 its capital stock stood at three hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars. The inventory form says the firm employed more than three hundred people here in its best years and was known across the country for sterling flatware. The form also walks through the additions: a brick water tower on the river side by 1906, a north wing of about 1926, a south wing dated 1947 by a stone block in its foundation, and the glass-and-metal entrance on the river side of about 2010. Towle renamed itself Merrimac Corporation in 1990 and the plant was sold in 1997 and turned into offices.

Sources: Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), p. 173 · MACRIS inventory form

The histories have little for this one, so it is our own research for this site that places a brush factory of 1863 here on the river side, across from the foot of Broad Street, and says it later made toothbrushes. Hurd's History of Essex County, published in 1888, does list a Harvard Brush Company among the city's employers of the 1880s, alongside the Towle companies, a water company, a quarry company and a towing company, as the kind of industry that had taken the place of shipbuilding; whether that was the firm working on this spot the book does not say. Look across the river from here, though, because this is the view the shipwrights had: the channel, Carr's Island upstream, and the Salisbury shore.

Sources: oldnbpt.com research · Hurd, History of Essex County, vol. 2 (1888)

Oakland Street was North Street, and Currier's History of 1906 says it was the northern boundary of Newburyport from 1764 until 1851; the city renamed it in 1852. Mrs. Smith, walking this way in 1854, says “The first ship-yard we approach, is that of Messrs. Manson & Fernald,” and Currier's 1896 “Ould Newbury” puts it plainly: “At the foot of Oakland Street Eben Manson built many ships and barks from the year 1853 to 1873.” His list in the 1906 History begins a year earlier, with the schooners Amelia and Golden West in 1852, and runs through barks and ships to a pair of schooners built for a Haverhill owner in 1874; the barks Sam Slick and Golden Rule and the schooners Flying Cloud and Helen Young were built in partnership with William Fernald. Our research for this site remembers the yard for its fast schooners, and one of them has a war story. Currier says the schooner Enchantress, 160 tons, built here by Manson, was taken by the Confederate cruiser Jeff Davis on July 6, 1861, and recaptured off Charleston by the U.S.S. Albatross before the month was out; her Newburyport owners were later paid three thousand dollars for the loss. Currier adds that A. F. Towle & Son put up a silver-plate factory at the foot of this street in 1882 and moved the machinery to Greenfield in 1890.

Sources: Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), pp. 173, 235, 347, 466–467 · Currier, “Ould Newbury” (1896), ch. "Old Ship-Yards" · Smith, History of Newburyport (1854), p. 270 · oldnbpt.com research

Merrimack Court was Poore's Lane, and Currier's “Ould Newbury” of 1896 says the way down it was the road to Carr's ferry as early as 1641. The sketch of this yard in that book is a son's: the historian John J. Currier was the shipbuilder's only surviving child, and Hurd's History of Essex County of 1888 says he kept his father's accounts and bought his materials for thirty years. “Ould Newbury” says John Currier Jr. began as a master builder in 1831 in the Merrill yard just upstream, bought about five acres on Poore's Lane from Ebenezer Savory on May 28, 1833, and moved here the next year. “During his long and active life he built nearly one hundred large vessels, with a total registered capacity of more than 90,000 tons.” Hurd counts them: ninety-seven vessels between 1831 and 1884, ninety-two of them ships, and in one busy year in the mid-1850s six ships averaging eight hundred tons. Mrs. Smith adds that a steam mill was put up in the yard in 1847 to saw the timber, and the second volume of Currier's History says the river steamer Merrimac was built here in 1850.

The 1906 History gives the yard's one literary moment. The ship Whittier, launched on January 14, 1869, was named for the Quaker poet, who sent his regrets: “I hope the Merrimack will give her a kindly welcome to her proper element.” Two of the yard's ships, the Star of Peace and the Charles Hill, were burned by Confederate cruisers in 1863. The last was the Mary L. Cushing of 1883, which Currier calls the last square-rigged vessel built in Massachusetts; the builder died on September 2, 1887. Our research for this site places the yard at the foot of Butler Street; Currier's own books call it the yard on Merrimack Court.

Sources: Currier, “Ould Newbury” (1896), ch. "Old Ship-Yards" · Hurd, History of Essex County, vol. 2 (1888) · Smith, History of Newburyport (1854), p. 264 · Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), pp. 235, 456–459 · Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 2 (1909), p. 72 · oldnbpt.com research

Emery says that “as early as 1730, Mr. Samuel Moggaridge had a dwelling house and building yard at the rocky point farther up the river, afterwards known as Moggaridge's point.” Currier's History of Newbury of 1902 goes back further: in 1641 travellers for Salisbury came down Poore's Lane to this point of rocks and found boatmen to row them across. He prints Moggaridge's contract of November 30, 1741, to build a vessel for Witter Cummings and Benjamin Harris, paid partly in cash and partly in flour, loaf sugar, a bag of cotton wool, a hogshead of rum and a hundredweight of cheese, and says that for more than twenty years Moggaridge was a prominent builder, a man with farms in three towns who also owned slaves. Hurd's History of Essex County says the “Jew's Rafts,” timber lashed into the shape of a ship and sailed to England for a Mr. Levi, were built in this yard; one reached London in 1770.

“Ould Newbury” names the men who followed: Jonathan Merrill, Nathan Merrill and Orlando B. Merrill, and after them the Jackmans. Currier's History of Newbury says the Merrills bought land near the point in 1798, and Mrs. Smith credits Orlando B. Merrill with more than sixty vessels, among them the ship Pickering in 1798 and, with William Cross, the sloop-of-war Wasp in 1813. The 1902 History also puts Donald McKay here before he was famous: employed by John Currier Jr. to superintend the ship Huntress in 1839, he and William Pickett built the St. George, 845 tons, in the Moggaridge yard in 1843, and the John R. Skiddy and Joshua Bates the next year, before he left for East Boston in 1845. He is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery here.

Sources: Emery, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (1879), p. 225 · Currier, History of Newbury (1902), pp. 437, 483–485, 491 · Hurd, History of Essex County, vol. 2 (1888) · Currier, “Ould Newbury” (1896), ch. "Old Ship-Yards" · Smith, History of Newburyport (1854), p. 261 · Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), p. 453

Forrester Street is younger than the yard; Currier's History of 1906 says the city laid it out from High Street to the river in 1859. Currier's History of Newbury says Stephen Jackman Jr. built twenty-five or thirty vessels between 1830 and 1848 in the yard next to the Moggaridge place, including thirteen brigs for Captain John N. Cushing and two coastal steamers, the Decatur and the Ohio. On December 6, 1849, his brother George W. Jackman Jr. bought “the Moggaridge estate” from Mary W. and Eleanor Moggaridge, the builder's descendants, who, Mrs. Smith says in 1854, still lived on the spot and lent her the 1741 contract. He took over Stephen's yard too, and launched his first vessel, the bark Hollander, in 1850; Smith lists the ship Whistler of 900 tons from his yard in 1853.

The 1906 History tells the rest. “During the Civil war the gunboat Marblehead, 529 tons register, and the steamer Ascutney, 1040 tons register, were built by George W. Jackman, Jr., for the United States government,” and in 1866 and 1867 he built the steamships Ontario and Erie, three thousand tons each, for a company of Boston merchants; our research for this site counts them the two largest wooden steamships built in Massachusetts. Currier's list of the yard ends with the ship Landseer in 1874. Jackman was the city's wartime mayor, serving in 1862, 1864 and 1865 according to the roll in the second volume of Currier's History, and again in 1877; Currier records him presiding at the memorial service for Lincoln in April 1865, and at the dinner for the returned soldiers that July.

Sources: Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), pp. 348, 423, 439, 457–459, 465–466 · Currier, History of Newbury (1902), pp. 491–492 · Smith, History of Newburyport (1854), pp. 72, 265 · Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 2 (1909), p. 606 · oldnbpt.com research

Ashland Street was Pilsbury's Lane, a drift way to the river that Currier's History of 1906 traces to 1735, renamed in 1852. His “Ould Newbury” says Elisha Briggs came from Pembroke in 1807 and set up as a shipbuilder here, and that the yard was afterwards enlarged and taken by William Currier and James L. Townsend, “who built there many famous clipper ships.” The History of Newbury says William Currier worked with Briggs before 1840 and with Donald McKay in 1842, and that Currier & Townsend's first vessels in this yard were the bark Talisman in 1843 and the ship St. Patrick in 1844. Mrs. Smith, counting in 1854, gives the firm twenty-three ships, two brigs, eight barques, a schooner and a steamboat in ten years, and prints the entry for the famous one: “Ship Dreadnaught, 1,400 tons, by Currier & Townsend, for D. Ogden and others, New York.”

Currier's 1906 History gives her the longest notice of any ship in the book. She was built for Governor E. D. Morgan, Francis B. Cutting, David Ogden and others of New York under the eye of Captain Samuel Samuels, who commanded her for nearly ten years; launched here on October 6, 1853, she left on November 3 for New York behind the tug Leviathan and spent her life as a Liverpool packet. “She was never passed in anything over a four-knot breeze.” Sailors called her the Wild Boat of the Atlantic, and in 1860 she ran from Sandy Hook to Queenstown in nine days and thirteen hours. Albert Hale's Old Newburyport Houses of 1912 gives her a plate of her own and says she was two hundred and ten feet long. Currier prints the sailors' song about her and her end: wrecked near Tierra del Fuego on July 4, 1869.

The firm, Currier says, was dissolved in 1856 through financial embarrassment; Townsend launched one more ship here, the Victory of 1857, and went to East Boston in 1865. Charles H. Currier & Co. and then George E. Currier kept the yard going, Hurd's History says, with schooners and barks into the 1880s, and Currier's list carries George E. Currier's last schooner to 1891.

Sources: Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (1906), pp. 348, 454–456, 459–460, 467–468 · Currier, “Ould Newbury” (1896), ch. "Old Ship-Yards" · Currier, History of Newbury (1902), pp. 491–492 · Smith, History of Newburyport (1854), pp. 264–265 · Hale, Old Newburyport Houses (1912), p. 67 · Hurd, History of Essex County, vol. 2 (1888)

Shipbuilding here had a second life as a hat factory. Our research for this site puts the Bayley Hat Company in the old Currier and Townsend workshop near the foot of Ashland Street from 1863, and says the mill stood until 1959. Hurd's History of Essex County, published while it was running, lists the company among the industries that had replaced the yards: incorporated in 1863 with seventy-five thousand dollars of capital, Benjamin Hale president, and a daily output of “one hundred and fifty dozen fur and wool hats,” worth a quarter of a million dollars a year. The treasurer, Hurd says, was John James Currier, the shipbuilder's son whose histories this walk has been quoting; Hurd's roll of mayors has him in office in 1879 and 1880 and Benjamin Hale in 1882. The shipwrights' sons, in other words, were running the hat mill. Nothing of it is left on the ground; the inventory of the city has no form for it, and the site's page is built from our own research.

Sources: oldnbpt.com research · Hurd, History of Essex County, vol. 2 (1888)