Top: Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, circa 1695, Newbury, Essex county, Massachusetts.Newbury reminds me of the west of Ireland. You come into Newbury via a roundabout. Head one direction and you’re going back in time to Newbury’s early American roots, to Newbury itself. Take off in the other and you end up in Newburyport, a town full of […]
Gloucester, Massachusetts: America’s Oldest Seaport
Top: Fisherman’s Memorial Cenotaph (Man at the Wheel Statue), Gloucester, Cape Ann, Wessex County, Massachusetts.Before Boston and Salem, there was Gloucester. Gloucester, Massachusetts was founded in 1623 by the Dorchester Company, the first settlement in what would in time become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The land wasn’t good for farming, and at the time, fishing […]
The Pursuit of Ichabod Crane, from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Writing in an introduction from a reprinting of the story in 1996, Henry Steiner, Village Historian of Sleepy Hollow states that “At the close of his narrative, Irving anticipates a time when change will have so completely altered Sleepy Hollow that cramped historians will doubt that it once existed at all.” Irving need not have […]