Forward

The enclosed History of Bellingham is incomplete. It was started several years ago as an attempt to document the sources for Partridges's History of Bellingham published in 1919. That book provided no sourcing or bibliography, thus gave no basis to follow up any area of the book. As published here there is also no sourcing, due more to my inability to put footnotes on the internet text than anything else.  If anyone wishes the source of any portion of the text it is available either by calling or by e mail. Many of the photographs that are or will be included are from my own files, others are from the files of the Bellingham Historical Commission. I do not expect this work to ever be completed except in fragments.
 

As noted elsewhere the history of Bellingham is a good contrast to that of Ipswich, Ma. The latter was a mainstream Puritan town with a more elitist settlement while the former was a more free thinking populace, largely Baptist, that was far from the mainstream. So far that in 1748 it became the first town in the Massachusetts colony to be legally allowed to renounce its Puritan Church and have no recognized church in the town (Baptists were not recognized).