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Grape Island (Essex County, Massachusetts)

Ipswich, MassachusettsIslands of Essex County, Massachusetts

Grape Island, sometimes known as Grape Island, Ipswich, is a part of Plum Island, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the United States. For nearly two centuries, Grape Island was a small, but thriving community of fishermen, farmers, and clam diggers, until the land was purchased by the US Government and turned into a wildlife refuge in the middle of the 20th century. Its last resident was Lewis Kilborn, who lived his entire life on the island until his death in 1984.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Grape Island (Essex County, Massachusetts) (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Grape Island (Essex County, Massachusetts)

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 42.719444444444 ° E -70.795277777778 °
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Ipswich


01938
Massachusetts, United States
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Ipswich River
Ipswich River

Ipswich River is a small river in northeastern Massachusetts, United States. It held significant importance in early colonial migrations inland from the ocean port of Ipswich. The river provided safe harborage at offshore Plum Island Sound to early Massachusetts subsistence farmers, who were also fishermen. A part of the river forms town boundaries and divides Essex County, Massachusetts on the coast from the more inland Middlesex County. It is 35 miles (56 km) long, and its watershed is approximately 155 square miles (401 km2), with an estimated population in the area of 160,000 people.Historically, the settlement of Essex County began at the oldest community there, the tiny seaport of Agawam (later renamed Ipswich, and not to be confused with present-day Agawam in Hampden County), and typically proceeded westward and northward along the Ipswich or its tributary creeks. When Middlesex County was formed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, only Salem and Charlestown across the Charles River mouth and Boston harbor's inner estuary from Boston's much smaller hill dominated peninsula were older settlements. The upper river runs through and drains at least parts of Burlington, the lower river forms part of the borders between the towns of: North Reading and Lynnfield Middleton and the city of Peabody Middleton and Danvers, and Boxford and Topsfield.The wide swamps along the river made it impossible to ford the stream anywhere east of Wilmington in colonial times. The only route north out of Boston to the northeast (today called the North Shore) was via the Andover Road, an often muddy track, later made a wagon road which forded the stream just below the confluence of Lubbers and Maple Meadow brooks.