Events

Nearly every house in Marblehead that predates 1775 was the home of a serviceman in America’s Revolutionary War. An estimated 300 houses still survive, even if modified by later generations, out of perhaps 525 or so that existed as the war began, when Marblehead was apparently still the sixth most populous metropolis in British North...

Join Historian, Writer, and Podcaster Alex Cain (Historical Nerdery), for this lecture on local Revolutionary Hero and French & Indian War Veteran Colonel James Frye. There will also be an update on the preservation of his ancestral home site.

  On his 27th birthday in May 1776 (May 19th), Captain James Mugford became an early Revolutionary War hero and martyr, killed in combat by the British in retaliation for his having audaciously and fortuitously captured a 300-ton British supply ship a day or two before. It’s a sad but fascinating story! – as his...

The Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, up above Charlestown, just north of Boston, early in the war, is famous for several reasons. The battle, the Revolutionary War’s first major combat involving cannons, was a loss for the Americans, but the British suffered a high number of casualties. One of the American revolution’s...

The Battle of Gloucester On a summer day in 1775, the British warship HMS Falcon sailed into Gloucester Harbor in pursuit of two colonial schooners. What followed became one of the first naval engagements of the American Revolution—and an unlikely victory for the townspeople of Gloucester. Captain John Linzee of the fourteen-gun sloop HMS Falcon...

The Battles of Lexington and Concord are well known as "the shot heard round the world" but have you ever heard of the Battle of Moore's Creek? Or the Revolutionary War connection between Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York and Dorchester Heights in Boston? Or the Mecklenburg Resolves? This talk by Professor Abby Chandler focuses...

Celebrate the spirit of independence with Abigail Adams: Liberty and Legacy at the historic Rocky Hill Meeting House! In this engaging performance, local actor Sheryl Faye brings to life one of America’s most influential women—a revolutionary, mother, and advocate for women’s rights. Set in the eighteenth-century Rocky Hill Meeting House, this program explores Adams’s intelligence, courage, and her...

John Glover is justly the most famous and celebrated of Marblehead’s hundreds of Revolutionary servicemen due to his capable and resolute leadership of his intrepid and unflinching Continental Army regiment during the war’s first year and a half, through December 1776, while he was a Colonel. Although the numbers of his soldiers were somewhat in...

Captain Nicholson Broughton earned honor as the first commodore of the United States Navy. But he first gained fame as captain of the even more famous schooner Hannah, the “first” official privateer vessel sent out from Marblehead / Beverly waters under a commission from George Washington in service of his Continental Army, on September 2,...