The John Cabot House is a brick mansion on Cabot Street in the heart of downtown Beverly. John Cabot was born in Salem, and he eventually lived in this house. He accumulated his wealth from privateering vessels during the Revolutionary War. On top of this, he also was a slave trafficker and traded opium later in his life with his son Joseph (Wallenfeldt, 2024). He built this house in 1781, and it was the first brick mansion built in Beverly. Following its ownership by the Cabots, the Beverly Bank was founded in the building in 1802 after purchasing it for $5,000 (Historic Beverly, 2024). 

When I visited this building, it was clear that the Cabots were wealthy. It is a very large brick building, which is not cheap, especially in the 1700s. The interior is beautiful, with gorgeous paneling and other details. The parlor, which Historic Beverly keeps in its original form, has exquisite furniture and other furnishings, which would be very impressive for guests when it was used for that. 

Click this link to Historic Beverly’s website for more information on John Cabot and his residence. 

Exhibits

Set at Liberty

Set At Liberty is the newest exhibit Historic Beverly has at the Cabot House, their main museum. This exhibit tells the story of enslavement in Beverly. While slavery was much more prominent in the South around the time of the Civil War, it did still exist in the North. This history is not talked about nearly as much and Set at Liberty strives to change that. Prior to the Finding Mingo event, I was able to talk with Abby Battis, the associate director of collections at Historic Beverly. She said that this exhibit was originally online on the Historic Beverly website. The organization believed that this was a very valuable exhibit that needed to be in the Cabot House (A. Battis, personal communication, November 14, 2024).

Because of this, they applied for a grant from the Cummings Foundation. They were awarded $270,000 for the exhibit (A. Battis, personal communication, November 14, 2024). Now, the exhibit is a semi-permanent one that, according to Goganian, will be up for at least 7-8 years (S. Goganian, personal communication, December 4, 2024). While some of this money obviously went towards putting it together, the bulk of it is for school groups. Historic Beverly, through the grant, will fund field trips for school groups in the area to visit the Cabot House and see the Set at Liberty exhibit. This is a massive step towards continuing the community engagement in the city’s history that Historic Beverly is striving to accomplish.

While I was walking through the exhibit, a lot of these stories were very interesting to me. This was a very well-put together exhibit. There was a natural flow of the room to where I could easily follow the stories and know which order to go in. There were also varied documents and primary sources that gave more life to the exhibit than just the posters on the wall giving information. Photos, ship logs, and bills of sale were on display showing where some of this information was gathered.

Block by Block: Naming Beverly

Naming Beverly is another exhibit that is on display at the Cabot House. This exhibit goes into the history of the names of public spaces in the city of Beverly. What was particularly interesting to me walking through this exhibit was the street names. There are countless streets in the city, most of which I have not been on, and every single one has a unique name. I never gave extensive thought to how many of these streets have meanings behind the names.

Historic Beverly grouped some names of streets and their reasoning into common categories, with one being colleges. In North Beverly, there are a group of streets named after colleges, including Cornell and Amherst. In Ryal Side and throughout the city, there are streets named after presidents of the United States. In other areas, there are streets named after prominent figures in the region, including John Endicott, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the namesake of Endicott College.

Finally, what I also liked about this exhibit was the non-historical attributes to it. There were two sections that had no history relating to them at all. One was an arts and crafts station in the middle. This appeals to younger kids who might not be overly interested in consuming history for their whole visit. The other was a street name suggestion table. There were slips of paper that visitors could write a suggestion for the name of a street on. In light of recent events, I suggested a name: Jeremy Cole Street.