For the journalists in our newsroom, covering Marblehead is an endless invitation to look twice.
The random road work delay, the cryptic complaint at a Select Board meeting, the caller who begins with “I’m not sure this is important, but …” — each day this quirky peninsula serves up fresh puzzles that refuse to fit in the news budget.
Follow one strange lead and suddenly they’re on their third callback, listening to someone’s great-uncle correct someone’s pronunciation of “gerrymandering” or squinting at a blurry PDF of meeting minutes from 1997. They survive on a good kind of initial bewilderment, coffee, deadline adrenaline and, most importantly, their insatiable curiosities — and they wouldn’t want it any other way.
Oftentimes, the town you thought you knew flips like a hidden panel in an old house, revealing an older layer we never knew was there — like the shift the season of summer offers to anyone willing to stop and wonder.
Ask the crews turning the former Gerry School blacktop into the Park on Elm Street. In May, their excavator struck granite and, after pumping out a greenish-blue water, revealed a round cistern, 24 feet across and 23 feet deep, laid by hand in the 19th century. On no modern map did that reservoir exist, yet there it sat, a firefighting safeguard for the families of Back Street — for nearly 130 years beneath our feet.
Across town another dig, albeit a purposeful one, is rewriting an earlier chapter. For a third summer archaeologists from UMass Boston’s Andrew Fiske Memorial Center are opening neat holes across the sprawling garden. Found relics include clay pipes, a bone knife handle and a mouth harp.
Discovery is not reserved for professionals. On his 64th birthday, Marbleheader Rich Coffman dipped his bike tire into the Atlantic at Fort Sewall and set off on a five-month ride to Santa Monica. This spirit — equal parts restlessness and reverence — mirrors the town itself: You think you know the road, and then it bends into something new.
Summer grants the rest of us gentler chances to roam. Wander the Historic District’s Alley Steps, the narrow granite flights once scaled by fishermen bound for drying racks on high ground. Descend to Fort Beach at low tide, where wet sand shines with sea glass the color of old Coke bottles and ship lanterns. Pause on the dozens and dozens of benches that frame the harbor’s skittering sails.
Visit the J.O.J. Frost Gallery at Marblehead Museum for a local history lesson through primitive art. Frost’s history scenes prove that creativity ignores age and credentials. He began painting at 70 and used house paint on wallboards.
Tucked behind paneled doors on Abbot Hall’s first floor, the Select Board Room began its life as the town’s library and took on its civic role in 1954, when the new Abbot Public Library opened on Pleasant Street. Today it doubles as Marblehead’s formal meeting spot and proper shrine to town history: Archibald M. Willard’s original “Spirit of ‘76” dominates the north wall, flanked by the 1684 town deed, Samuel Road, Jr.’s personal copy of “The History and Traditions of Marblehead” under a glass enclosure and historic letters from President George Washington, Elbridge Gerry and Paul Revere hanging on wall space under a Frost painting.
When heat presses, take refuge on Marblehead Neck. The Audubon Sanctuary’s looping trails hum with more than birdsong. Chipmunks dart through underbrush, turtles bask on sunlit logs and red foxes leave prints near quiet trails. Bring binoculars or bring nothing; either way, the quiet will reorder your pulse.
Rise before dawn and begin the day at the Driftwood, the crown jewel among local dive diners, on Front Street. The restaurant opens at 6 a.m. Walk off that breakfast on public ways that lace the town together. Some are posted, others unsigned, many just old cow paths hugging stone walls. Follow one without checking your phone, and you may stumble onto a pocket beach, a Revolutionary-era foundation or an osprey platform.
This town rewards the walker who does not predetermine the destination, and the sole requirement is that you stay curious.
