Maybe I have spent too much time riding the Blue Line, but when I hear the word “maverick,” I think of a rapid-transit stop, not a Marblehead neighborhood.
The word first caught my attention as I was reading through the 2014 Marblehead Community-Wide Historic Preservation Survey Master Plan prepared by Larson Fisher Associates for the town’s Historical Commission.
The town’s Maverick neighborhood is bounded by Village Street to the north, the West Shore neighborhood to the northwest, the Reed’s Hill neighborhood to the west, the Wyman Woods neighborhood to the south, the Devereux neighborhood to the southeast, and Pleasant Street to the east.
Perhaps the most notable landmark in the Maverick neighborhood is the Veterans Memorial Middle School, which all but makes up the northeastern corner. Not to be overlooked, however, is the Rail Trail, which intersects in a triangular form at the center of the neighborhood.
Just like the Neck, the Maverick neighborhood was originally deemed unsuitable for development and most agriculture. The master plan states that the land was used primarily for “wood lots, pasturage, and other passive agricultural functions” because it was “uneven and boggy.”
By the creation of the 1912 atlas of Marblehead, the land in what is now the Maverick neighborhood had been divided into long tracts of land running perpendicular to Pleasant Street.
A plot of the Maverick neighborhood abutting Pleasant Street was owned by the town for its municipal farm. Today, the middle school stands where this farm once was.
The name Maverick comes from Moses Maverick, a man often nicknamed the “town father” or “father of Marblehead.” It is unknown when Maverick was born, but he and his wife died in 1685.
A section in “Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the Town of Marblehead, 1844 to 1850” titled “A Pedigree from Moses Maverick” details some of his life. The handwritten section begins, “Moses Maverick and Eunice his wife were among the first settlers in Marblehead.”
According to the document, they were also members of the First Church of Christ in Marblehead, which opened in 1684 with 54 members.
It continues, “Moses Maverick appears to have been the most distinguished character in the place, from its settlement to 1685. He was usually first on the list of ‘townsmen,’ as they were then called, discharged the duties of town clerk, and solemnized all the marriages ‘till 1685…”
If all this was true and he was such a stand-up guy, then I guess the Maverick neighborhood has a pretty good namesake.