Four hundred years, briefly.
Plymouth Colony's second town. Home of Standish and Alden. Then the shipbuilding boom, the bust that froze the town in amber, and the quiet century that saved it. The short version, with the long one on its way.
Myles Standish’s grave, Old Burying Ground · photo K. Zirkel / CC BY-SAThe Wampanoag homeland
The land along the bay was inhabited for thousands of years before European settlement; archaeological sites in town date back millennia, and the Massachusetts Historical Commission has documented dozens of them.
Pilgrims cross the bay
Mayflower passengers Myles Standish and John Alden take land grants north of Plymouth along the bay. Standish names the settlement after Duxbury Woods near his English hometown of Chorley, Lancashire.
Plymouth Colony's second town
Duxbury incorporates, reckoned the second town of Plymouth Colony, its congregation gathered as the colony's second church as early as 1632. For its first two centuries it stays a quiet farming and fishing community; the first school opens in 1670.
Revolution on the doorstep
Duxbury men muster at the Lexington alarm, and colonial officers hold a council of war at the Alden homestead. In the years prior, crowds burned effigies of British officials on Captain's Hill.
The shipbuilding boom
After the Revolution, Duxbury explodes into one of the great shipbuilding centers of the New World: roughly 20 shipyards, some 180 vessels, and the Weston family's merchant fleet ranking among the largest anywhere. The grand homes along Washington Street and Powder Point date to this golden age; the finest of them, the King Caesar House, is now a museum.
The bust
Steamships and railroads make Duxbury's wooden sailing vessels obsolete almost overnight. The yards close, families leave to find work, and the population falls by nearly half over the century. The hard times froze the town's streetscapes in place, and by the time summer visitors and preservationists arrived, Duxbury's golden-age architecture was still standing to save.
Saving the town
Concerned residents found the Duxbury Rural Society (today the Duxbury Rural & Historical Society) to 'improve and ornament' the fading town. It still maintains the historic house museums and some 140 acres of conservation land.
The bridge
The Powder Point Bridge opens, connecting the mainland to the barrier beach. It was rebuilt a century later in the same wooden style, and it still carries beachgoers today (see the beach guide).
The suburb by the sea
Route 3 puts Boston within commuting range and the population booms. Modern Duxbury is a residential town with a village feel, known for schools, the beach, oyster farming, and one of the best-preserved historic centers on the coast.
Deeper reading
King Caesar
The Westons of Powder Point, the ship Hope, and how a shallow-bay town briefly held America's largest merchant fleet.
02
The Courtship of Myles Standish
The 1858 poem that made three Duxbury founders famous, and what the record actually shows.
03
The Powder Point Bridge
Built 1892, burned 1985, rebuilt 1987, and now at the center of a fight over its future.
04
Mattakeesett
Ten thousand years of Native history on this shore, told plainly: the place of many fish, the Great Dying, Clark's Island, and the Nation still here.
05
Myles Standish, the actual soldier
The hired sword of Plymouth Colony, the Wessagusset killings, and the farmer of the Nook. The record without the varnish.
06
The summer resort era
How an 1871 railroad, a $1.50 ticket, and a grand hotel rescued a dying town and invented modern Duxbury.
07
Duxbury after dark
The grave dug up three times, the feud it caused, and the tavern with a resident who never checked out. Fact and folklore, labeled.