Ipswich is a coastal town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 13,785 at the 2020 census. Home to Willowdale State Forest and Sandy Point State Reservation, Ipswich includes the southern part of Plum Island. A residential community with a vibrant tourism industry, the town is famous for its clams, celebrated annually at the Ipswich Chowderfest, and for Crane Beach, a barrier beach near the Crane estate. Ipswich was incorporated as a town in 1634.

Ipswich was founded by John Winthrop the Younger, son of John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and its first governor, elected in England in 1629. Several hundred colonists sailed from England in 1630 in a fleet of 11 ships, including Winthrop’s flagship, the Arbella. Investigating the region of Salem and Cape Ann, they entertained aboard the Arbella for a day, June 12, 1630, a native chief of the lands to the north, Chief Masconomet. The event was recorded in Winthrop’s journal on the 13th, but Winthrop did not say how they overcame the language barrier. The name they heard from Masconomet concerning the country over which he ruled has been reconstructed as Wonnesquamsauke, which the English rendered as “Agawam”. The colonists, however, sailed to the south where some buildings had already been prepared for them at a place newly named Charlestown.

That winter they lost a few hundred colonists to malnutrition and disease. They also experienced their first nor’easter, which cost them some fingers and toes, as well as houses destroyed by the fires they kept burning day and night. Just as Winthrop was handing out the last handful of grain, the supply ship Lyon entered Boston Harbor. John sent for his family in England, but his then wife, Margaret, her children, and his eldest son, John, whose mother was the elder John’s first wife, Mary Forth, did not arrive until November, on the Lyon.

John the Younger resided with his father and stepmother until 1633, when he resolved to settle in Agawam, with the permission of the General Court of Massachusetts. Captain John Smith had written about the Angoam or Aggawom region in 1614, calling it “an excellent habitation, being a good and safe harbour.”

John the Younger and 12 men aboard a shallop sailed into Ipswich harbor and took up residence there. The first settlers with Winthrop were William Clerk, Robert Coles, Thomas Howlet, John Biggs, John Gage, Thomas Hardy, William Perkins, John Thorndike, William Sergeant, and three others whose names are uncertain. Two men continued up the river (now River Road) to a large meadow, which they called New Meadows, now Topsfield. Agawam was incorporated on August 5, 1634, as Ipswich, after Ipswich in the county of Suffolk, England. The name “Ipswich” was taken “in acknowledgment of the great honor and kindness done to our people which took shipping there.” Nathaniel Ward, an assistant pastor in town from 1634 to 1636, wrote the first code of laws for Massachusetts and later published the religious/political work The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America in England.

In 1638, Masconomet entered into a contract with John Winthrop the Younger for the purchase of Ipswich for “wampampeage, & other things: and … also for the sume of twenty pounds.” There is no record of any Native resistance to the colonization either at Charlestown or at Agawam, though there is documentation of devastating virgin soil epidemics among indigenous people in the area around 1617 and again in 1633, and contemporary reports attest to ghost towns encountered by early English settlers.

Pioneers became farmers, fishermen, shipbuilders or traders. The tidal Ipswich River provided water power for mills, and salt marshes supplied hay for livestock. A cottage industry in lace-making developed. Ipswich Lace is a unique style, and the only known hand-made bobbin lace produced commercially in the U.S. But in 1687, Ipswich residents, led by the Reverend John Wise, protested a tax imposed by the governor, Sir Edmund Andros. As Englishmen, they argued, taxation without representation was unacceptable. Citizens were jailed, but then Andros was recalled to England in 1689, and the new British sovereigns, William III and Mary II, issued colonists another charter. The rebellion is the reason the town calls itself the “Birthplace of American Independence”.