It is a town of many open views of farm lands, lakes, woodlands, historic homes, and old stone walls that accompany its winding tree-lined roads.

[2] Wenham is closely tied to its neighboring town of Hamilton, sharing a school system, library, recreation department, commuter rail station, and newspaper.

[4] English settlers came to Wenham in the 1630s, but the area had been home to the Agawam people, an Eastern Algonquian tribe whose numbers were greatly reduced by a massive epidemic around 1617, possibly smallpox.

Salem's minister Hugh Peters preached to a group on a hill by the Great Pond around 1638, probably to encourage settlement.

The earliest land grants in the Wenham area roughly coincide with Peters' sermon.

The hill was leveled in later years to make room for the ice industry at the Great Pond.

In 1774, the town voted to select 15 men as minutemen, and from that time on Loyalists were not welcome in Wenham.

In 1909, steel magnate Henry Clay Frick bought the Iron Rail property so that his daughter Helen could create a vacation home for the mill girls throughout New England.

[7] Helen Frick transferred the Iron Rail Vacation Home to the Girls' Clubs of America in 1954, and the town of Wenham bought the property in the 1970s.

In 1921, the Historical Committee of the Wenham Village Improvement Society bought the 17th-century Claflin-Richards house at the center of town.

The Wenham Historical Association and Museum became independent from the Village Improvement Society and underwent a major renovation and expansion in 1997.

Wenham is bordered on the south by Beverly, on the east by Manchester-by-the-Sea, on the north by Hamilton, on the northwest by Topsfield, and on the west by Danvers.