Chelsea

Chelsea, a city of Suffolk county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., a suburb of Boston. Pop. (1890) 27,909; (1900) 34,072, of whom 11,203 were foreign-born; (1910) 32,452. It is situated on a peninsula between the Mystic and Chelsea rivers, and Charlestown and East Boston, and is connected with East Boston and Charlestown by bridges. It is served by the Boston & Maine and (for freight) by the Boston & Albany railways. The United States maintains here naval and marine hospitals, and the state a soldiers’ home. Chelsea’s interests are primarily industrial. The value of the city’s factory products in 1905 was $13,879,159, the principal items being rubber and elastic goods ($3,635,211) and boots and shoes ($2,044,250.) The manufacture of stoves, and of mucilage and paste are important industries. Flexible tubing for electric wires (first made at Chelsea 1889) and art tiles are important products. The first settlement was established in 1624 by Samuel Maverick (c. 1602-c. 1670), the first settler (about 1629) of Noddle’s Island (or East Boston), and one of the first slave-holders in Massachusetts; a loyalist and Churchman, in 1664 he was appointed with three others by Charles II. on an important commission sent to Massachusetts and the other New England colonies (see  Nicolls, Richard), and spent the last years of his life in New York. Until 1739, under the name of Winnisimmet, Chelsea formed a part of Boston, but in that year it was made a township; it became a city in 1857. In May 1775 a British schooner in the Mystic defended by a force of marines was taken by colonial militia under General John Stark and Israel Putnam,—one of the first conflicts of the War of Independence. A terrible fire swept the central part of the city on the 12th of April 1908.

See Mellen Chamberlain (and others), History of Chelsea (2 vols., Boston, 1908), published by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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