Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, and a suburb of Boston.

[4] Native Americans inhabited what would become northeastern Massachusetts for thousands of years before European colonization of the Americas.

[6] Europeans, under Roger Conant's leadership, first colonized the area in 1626 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Initially part of Salem, Beverly would be set off and officially incorporated in 1668, when it was named after Beverley, the county town of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.

[7][8][9] Surviving from the settlement's early history is the Balch House, built, according to dendrochronological testing performed in 2006, about 1679.

[10] English colonists did not initially seek permission from indigenous inhabitants to settle in Beverly; however, when Charles II revoked colonial charters to establish the Dominion of New England in 1684, Beverly joined a number of Massachusetts municipalities in seeking out heirs to local sachems and paying them ex post facto in order to establish a right to the land.

So it was that in 1686, the town selectmen agreed to pay six pounds, six shillings, and eight pence to three grandchildren of Chief Masconomet, last sachem of the Agawam.

[5] The first ship commissioned for the US military, by the US Army (the US Navy had yet to exist), was the armed schooner USS Hannah, under the command of Captain Nicholson Broughton.

In 1902, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation built a quarter-mile (400 m) stretch of factory buildings in Beverly.

Closed in 1987, the complex was bought by Cummings Properties in 1996, and developed into a campus of hi-tech companies, salons, restaurants, medical offices, and more.

It is now used by Beverly as a storage site and is under the scrutiny of many environmental organizations, due to concerns about polluted groundwater, which could be potentially hazardous to the nearby Wenham Lake water supply.

In April 2013, Bill Scanlon, Beverly's longest-serving mayor, announced that he would not be running for re-election in November.

Scanlon first won election to the mayor’s seat in 1993 and held the office through 2013 (with the exception of a single term by Tom Crean from 2002–2003).

The award focused on two Beverly efforts: the conversion of its vehicle fleet to electric and its Green Schools Program, which involves making buildings more energy efficient.

Salem Mayor Kimberley Driscoll also received an honorable mention for her work on Resilient Together, a Beverly-Salem collaboration to address climate change.

[17] Beverly is home to The Cabot, one of only approximately 250 similar movie palaces left out of an estimated 20,000 theaters built in the 1920s.

In 1944, the venue was leased to movie chain giant E.M. Loew’s, which eventually purchased it in 1962, and renamed it the Cabot Cinema.

For 37 years, The Cabot hosted Le Grand David’s long-running magic show that made seven White House appearances and won recognition in the Guinness Book of Records and TIME, Smithsonian and National Geographic World magazines.

In 2016, The Cabot embarked on a multi-year, multi-million dollar renovation to not only restore parts of the theater to its original 1920s grandeur and upgrade and modernize all current systems to better enhance the live experience, including replacement of all theater seating, opera box restoration, new sound and stage lighting systems, new heating and air conditioning, and most recently, the completion of the lobby renovation and restoration of the original rose window.

Accordingly, the city experiences generally cold and snowy winters (though temperature and precipitation can vary greatly) along with warm to hot and humid summers.

Beverly is prone to thunderstorms and tropical rainstorms in the summer and nor'easters that can bring heavy rain and/or in the winter, fall, and spring.

The city has five K–4 elementary schools: Ayers Ryal Side, Centerville, Cove, Hannah, and North Beverly.

Along the Rockport portion of the line are two working stops, Montserrat and Beverly Farms, as well as the Prides Crossing station to which service is indefinitely suspended.