Haverhill

City in Essex County, northeastern Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River, 50 km/31 mi north of Boston; population (2000 est) 56,300. It is situated in an agricultural region, and manufactures electronic equipment, computers, paints, chemicals, machine tools, and shoes. Haverhill was founded in 1640 and incorporated as a city in 1870.

First named Pentucket after the local American Indian tribe, the town was founded by 12 Puritans from Ipswich and Newbury. It changed its name to Haverhill, after the town in Suffolk, England, in 1642. It is one of a line of old industrial towns stretching along the Merrimack valley of New Hampshire and Massachusetts – from Concord in the north to Haverhill at the seaward end – that utilized hydroelectric power provided by the river to develop textile and leather industries. Haverhill was particularly renowned for shoemaking during the 19th and early 20th centuries. All these cities have come under economic strain as the relative importance of their traditional industries has declined (particularly as cotton-textile industries have expanded in the southern states), and many of their old mill structures have been converted to house other types of activity.

Bob Montana, creator of the ‘Archie’ comic strip, lived in Haverhill.

Haverhill is the seat of Bradford College (1803). The poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was born near here in 1807. The businessman Rowland Hussey Macey, who founded Macey's department store in New York in 1858, opened his first shop in Haverhill in 1851. The film producer Louis B Mayer bought his first film theatre here in 1907.

Haverhill

Market town in Suffolk, England, on the borders of Essex and Cambridgeshire, 30 km/19 mi southeast of Cambridge. It grew up on the Roman road known as the Via Devana. Most of the town was destroyed by fire in 1665, and extensive housing estates and factories were built in the 1950s to take population overspill from London.

Haverhill's parish church, built in the 14th and 15th centuries, was restored after the 1665 fire. The manor house, latterly the vicarage, was built in the 17th century and contains some impressive wood panelling. To the southeast are indistinct remains of an ancient earthwork known as Haverhill Castle. Kedington, 3 km/2 mi to the south, has a church with many tombs and fittings dating from the 13th to the 19th centuries.