July 14, 1916. 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE and Reminder y 
Tales of Story-Book Marblehead 
By ANNE ACTON 
oA queer, old place; yet every stone that trips you in its streets 
Is instinet with the loyal pulse that in its bosom beats. 
This may be metaphor: it is but true as gospel still, 
For Marblehead is Marblehead, has been and always will.’’ 
[' has been truly said of our great New York City that 
there is but one New York; that it bears no resem- 
blance to any other place; that it is original, distinct, 
different. 
The same might also be said of the little town of 
Marblehead, but for very different reasons; for while 
New York is a city of today, with all evidences of its 
past obliterated by the unsentimental march of progress, 
Marblehead, although nearing its three hundredth birth- 
day, is still more eloquent of yesterday. 
_A quaintly picturesque bit of the past, clustering up- 
on and around the rocky headlands that give it its name, 
is Marblehead. A town of winding, circling, labyrinthine 
streets, for the most part barren of sidewalks, that lead 
you on over many a hill and through many a hollow, but 
always down to the sea, where the great, blue ocean seems 
somehow to mother the little town, for all its rocky 
barriers. 
Motoring among these oddly-terraced byways of 
Marblehead is like nothing so much as riding a roller- 
coaster or scenic railway, with long, steep climbs, sudden 
dips and occasional glimpses of other vehicles far below 
on the parallel road you have just travelled. 
There is no precision, no symmetry, no uniformity in 
the aspect of the little place. Nor is it haphazard, either, 
but evidence of an independence as sturdy as its founda- 
tion rocks. Dwellings were the first consideration of its 
practical settlers. Thoroughfares were an afterthought 
and were made to suit the convenience of the owner, with 
no arbitrary custom to dictate how or where. 
You may know the “Neck” and Devereux and Clif- 
ton and perhaps you have motored down through the odd, 
story-book town to the exclusive Peach’s Point. They 
are the Marblehead of today. Small trace is left of the 
clustering settlement on “John Peach’s Neck” as Peach’s 
Point was once called, and even the sea and the sky have 
forgotten that the fashionable “Neck” once harbored King 
George’s unwelcome redcoats and that the Naumkeag 
Indians, ages ago, were undisputed owners of the now 
sightly Devereux and Clifton. 
But it is not so in old Marblehead and if instead of 
continuing on to Peach’s Point, you will turn off to the 
right of the Point road, you will find yourself on Fisher- 
man’s Beach, where ir. the shadow of the brown, weather- 
beaten homes of the fissermen you can look out over the 
age-old sea and dream ou are in the Marblehead of 
years ago. — 
A pitifully small, pebbly stretch is this beach today, 
with the comfortable house and prim garden of a 
summer residence crowding it un the right and on the 
left a boatyard pressing as close «3 possible to the stone 
that is one of its boundaries. Gone a‘e the wharves where 
schooners from the Grand Banks b1.ught their “fare”; 
dead is the industry that for so many years was prac- 
tically the only one in Marblehead. 
And now close your eyes to all sights of the present. 
the old houses that edge the beach are veritable story- 
books and.the waves that play over the pebbles have 
tales upon tales to tell you and, if you will, they will take 
you back 
Over the years that span the way 
‘Twirt the far-off then and the near today. 
BARNEGAT 
This is Barnegat, the quaintest, oldest part of the 
Marblehead Harbor—Delight of Yachtsmen. 
