Ipswich Mills Historic District

Ipswich Mills Historic District is an industrial neighborhood on the Ipswich River south of the town center, locally called the Alley or Pole Alley. Red brick mill buildings with simple Italianate details form its gateway, the oldest dating to 1880 and housing the former yarn mill. Behind them, wood-frame tenements, company-built single and duplex houses, and a few earlier homes line a tight grid of small lots. Former stores, halls and social clubs along Estes and Peatfield Streets show how self-sufficient the neighborhood was in the early twentieth century. The mill company employed about 800 workers in 1904 and about 1,500 by 1917, many of them immigrants who lived in company housing. Demolitions in the 1970s removed the knitting mill, box shop and machine shop, and many houses have gained modern siding. Even so, the district keeps its scale, form and layout as a record of Ipswich's hosiery industry. The site of the Whipple House, a ca. 1655 dwelling moved in 1927, is also included.