Essex County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Essex County

Granite quarried out of the Rockport headlands between 1860 and 1929 supplied the Brooklyn Bridge towers (1883), the Manhattan Bridge anchors (1909), the New York Public Library plinth (1911), and the rough-coursed foundation course of the Statue of Liberty's Bedloe Island pedestal (1886) — the Cape Ann Granite Company and the Rockport Granite Company shipped roughly 35 million cubic feet of stone via barge out of Rockport Harbor over those 70 years per the Sandy Bay Historical Society quarrying archives, making coastal Essex County the primary structural-granite source for late-19th-century New York infrastructure. Twenty-three abandoned quarry pits, now flooded into freshwater swimming holes, remain on Halibut Point and Pigeon Cove. Essex County's 493 sq mi wrap Salem (population 44,480, infamous for the 1692 Witch Trials in which 19 accused were hanged on Gallows Hill and one — Giles Corey — was pressed to death under stones), Gloucester (population 29,729, founded 1623 by the Dorchester Company and continuously operating as a working commercial fishing port for 400+ years, making it the oldest seaport in continuous operation in the United States), the Cape Ann tourism economy, and the entire North Shore commuter corridor along MA-128.

Salem Maritime National Historic Site preserves the 1762 Derby Wharf, the Custom House (where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a surveyor and where he wrote The Scarlet Letter's introduction), and three reconstructed period vessels along the historic waterfront. Salisbury Beach State Reservation at the New Hampshire border holds the county's only state-park RV-friendly campground, accepting rigs to 38 ft with electric hookups across 484 sites — the largest state-park campground in eastern Massachusetts, with reservations opening 6 months ahead on the ReserveAmerica MA platform and selling out within minutes for July and August weekends. Cape Ann town centers (Rockport, Gloucester, Manchester-by-the-Sea) all prohibit overnight RV street parking; commercial RV-friendly bases concentrate along MA-128 and US-1 north of Boston. Crane Beach in Ipswich (privately-owned by The Trustees of Reservations) holds the most-cited Boston-area summer-weekender beach but accepts no overnight vehicle camping.