History of
Montserrat
When people think of Montserrat they think of the train station that bears that same name. The train was the major way to get around the North Shore in the early 1900’s. There was even a part of Montserrat train station that was the B&M or Boston to Maine train station. That was very popular when President Taft stayed in Beverly. People would come from all over New England to see the President and the quickest way to get here was on the B&M railroad.
Now, the train that ran from Gloucester to Boston was still popular, but at the beginning of the century you could not beat the B&M . The trolley was also in use and you just had to catch it at one of it's stops. It started downtown and ran all the way into the Cove . It was the most inexpensive way to travel except for on foot. The mass production of the automobile didn’t happen untill 1914, so the use of the automobile was not popular. In Montserrat there were many working class people so an automobile may have been too expensive.1
A cross section of religions appears in Monserrat. On Brimbal Avenue, you will find St. Mary’s Cemetery and you will find many Catholics . You will also find some protestants . There were no churches in Montserrat . It many have been that there are many churches in downtown Beverly and because there is a church right in the Cove . 2
The work force was very surprising in Montserrat. The United Shoe Corp was a large job place for many of people in Montserrat. I thought that Montserrat would be a largely isolated population , kind of like the Cove, and it would have had it's own work force of small stores . But I found that for generations , workers from Montserrat would go to work at the Shoe in the morning and come home at night to have dinner . The Shoe was a good source of work for all of Beverly, not just Montserrat . Another source of work was working during the winter cutting ice blocks out of Kelleher’s Pond.3
The education was interesting . There were no schools in Montserrat to speak of until the 1960’s, but the surrounding neighborhoods made up for it . The Cove school was right around the preverbal corner and the Hardie School was not too far away. For the high school kids, Briscoe was just around the bend at 16 Essex Street. So even though education was not provided in the floating boundaries of Montserrat , it was provided just outside its borders .4
A good example of public safety in Montserrat is the hospital . The Beverly Hospital was started around the 1880’s and it is still in service to Beverly and the surrounding cities. It started off as a four building hospital but it soon began to grow to accommodate the growing number of patients , and it continues to grow even now. It has been one of the better hospitals on the North Shore since the turn of the twentith century . 5
The Montserrat Golf Club was a major attraction for the little neighborhood . Located at 67 Boyle Street the Club gained an enormous amount of attention when President Taft and his son Charles spent time there playing golf and tennis and dancing the nights away. People settled into their summer homes in Prides Crossing and would make thier way to the Golf Club to join in the festivities with the President.6 Another thing to do was to watch the Thundering Herd at Hurd stadium when it was built in 1936 as part of a WPA, Works Progress Association . Before that , football games were played on Cooney field. There was also the summertime showcase of baseball talent at the Peabody field on Lowell and Sherman streets . People would come from all over the North Shore just to see the kids play. 7
The origin of the Monserrat neighborhood is pretty straight forward. Henry W. Peabody was a wealthy man and a world traveler. He bought 150 acres of land and built the “Paramatta” house in 1890 which attracted national attention because President Taft chose to do his vacationing at Paramatta House .This caused more people to come to Montserrat because if the President thought it was a great place to vacation so did the nation. Many people decided they liked the quiet neighborhood and started to move in permanently. 8
The origin of the name Monserrat still has researchers researching. A group of researchers in 1974 were at a loss. They thought that Henry Peabody, being a world traveler, had probably chosen the name after returning from his favorite island in the West Indies, Monserrat Island . The researchers found this to be untrue because Monserrat had been named at least 60 years before Henry Peabody moved there.9 Others believe that the name was borrowed from an island in the Lesser Antilles called Montserrat .10 I believe Monserrat got it's name from seamen who returned from the Sugar Islands, and produced a drink called Monserrat Lime Juice, which was traded by British Merchants around 1708.11
The boundaries of Monserrat are a topic no one is sure the answer of . If you ask people what the boundaries are you are likely to get a different answer from each person. I tried to define the boundaries as the end of Lothrop Street to the south, right before Stanley Street in the west and just before Cabot Street on the train tracks in Gloucester Crossing and the last boundary was at Rt.128 on Brimbal Avenue.
Montserrat was mostly a Massachusetts community. Most residents were born and bred in Massachusetts and so were their parents. There was a large Canadian English population and smaller Irish , French , Swedish and US populations but for the most part , Montserrat was a local community. There were thirty-two Massachusetts, twenty-six Canadian English, four Irish, four French, one Scotsman, two Spanish, twenty-two New Englanders, four from Pennsylvania and one from Kentucky. It follows it’s neighbor Cove and stays very Massachusetts based, which means when the people moved in, they stay there for generations.12