HAVERHILL (hav'ril), a city of Essex county, Massa chusetts, at the head of navigation on the Merrimack river, 33 m. N. of Boston. It is served by the Boston and Maine railroad. The population was 53,884 in 192o; and it was 48,710 in 193o. The city has an area of 34.35 sq.m., extending for 9 m. along the N. bank of the river, and including on the opposite bank the former town of Bradford. The surface is undulating, with several detached round hills (2 50 to 34o ft. high) , and there are five lakes within the boundaries. The public parks have an area of 259 ac. and there is a system of supervised playgrounds. Haverhill has been an important industrial centre for over two centuries. The manu facture of slippers, shoes and boots, which has long been the leading industry, was established about 1795, and the city now makes about 6 of all the women's shoes produced in the country. The husband of Hannah Dustin (see below) was a brickmaker, and that industry has been carried on in the same locality ever since. The manufacture of woollen hats dates from the middle of the i8th century, and woollen mills were established in 1835. The aggregate factory output in 1925 was valued at The assessed valuation of property for 1927 was Haverhill was founded in 1640 by the Rev. John Ward, a native of Haverhill, England. The Indian name of the place was Pentucket. The site was bought from the Indians in 1642 for £3.105., and the deed is preserved in the museum of the Historical society. The frontier settlement suffered severely from the Indians. In Hannah Dustin, with her new-born child and nurse, were kidnapped and carried north to the vicinity of Penacook, now Concord, New Hampshire. With the aid of the nurse and a captive English boy, Mrs. Dustin tomahawked and scalped ten Indians, and escaped down the river to her home. In 1708 a party of 25o French and Indians attacked the village, killing 4o of the inhabitants. There was a destructive fire in 1873, and again in 1882, when almost the whole of the shoe district was burned. A petition from Haverhill to the House of Representatives in 1842, praying for the peaceable dissolution of the Union, was one of the most violently debated of the long series presented by John Quincy Adams in his defence of the right of petition. Haverhill was the birthplace (1807) and the home until 1836 of John Greenleaf Whittier. The Whittier homestead, now kept as a literary shrine, is the scene of his Snow-Bound, and his poems are full of allusions to places in the city and incidents in the lives of its people. Haverhill was incor porated as a town in 1645 ; as a city in 1869. Bradford, settled in 1649 and annexed to Haverhill in 1897, is the seat of Bradford academy (1803) , one of the oldest schools for girls in the country. In 1909 the city adopted a commission form of government.