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History

Fairhaven was first settled in 1670 as “Cushnea,” the easternmost part of the town of Dartmouth. It was founded on land purchased by English settlers at the Plymouth Colony from the natives, — specifically, from the Wampanoagsachem whose name was Massasoit, and his son, Wamsutta. 

The town has a total area of 14.1 square miles, of which, 12.4 square miles is land and 1.7 square miles is water. The town is located on Buzzards Bay, on the eastern bank of the mouth of the Acushnet River, and is the southeastern-most town in Bristol County.

In 1787, the eastern portion of the Dartmouth township seceded and formed a new settlement called New Bedford. This new town included areas that are the present-day towns of Fairhaven, Acushnet, and New Bedford itself. Fairhaven eventually separated from New Bedford, and it was officially incorporated in 1812. At that time, Fairhaven included all of the land on the east bank of the Acushnet River. A portion of Fairhaven, the northern portion, upriver from Buzzards Bay, formed another independent town, called Acushnet, in 1860. Thus, what had once been a single town, Dartmouth, with a substantial land area, became, in less than 75 years, four separate municipalities.

Fort Phoenix (now called the Fort Phoenix State Reservation) is located in Fairhaven at the mouth of the Acushnet River, and it served, during colonial and revolutionary times, as the primary defense against seaborne attacks on New Bedford harbor.

Within sight of the fort, the first naval battle of the American Revolution took place on 14 May 1775. Under the command of Nathaniel Pope and Daniel Egery, a group of twenty-five Fairhaven minutemen aboard the sloop Success captured two British vessels in Buzzards Bay.

On 5 and 6 September 1778, the British landed four thousand soldiers on the west side of the Acushnet River. They burned ships and warehouses in New Bedford, skirmished at the Head-of-the-River bridge (approximately where the Main Street bridge in Acushnet is presently situated), and marched through Fairhaven to Sconticut Neck, burning homes along the way. In deference to the overwhelming force approaching from the landward side, the fort was abandoned, and it was destroyed by the enemy.  Today, the area surrounding the fort includes a park and a bathing beach. The fort lies just to the seaward side of the harbor’s hurricane barrier

Whaling
Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, whale oil was the primary source of fuel for lighting in the United States. The whaling industry was an economic mainstay for many New England coastal communities for over two hundred years. The famous whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts is located across the Acushnet River from Fairhaven. Fairhaven was also a whaling port; in fact, in the year 1838, Fairhaven was the second-largest whaling port in the United States with twenty-four vessels sailing for the whaling grounds. The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, departed from the port of Fairhaven aboard the whaling ship, Acushnet, in 1841.

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Town Beach, West Island, Fairhaven, Mass.