North Andover Homes For Sale

North Andover's story begins as part of a single town: English settlers arrived in the area in 1634 and incorporated it as Andover in 1646, likely naming it for Andover, Hampshire, England, home to many early residents. For two centuries the North Parish and South Parish coexisted uneasily, and a long-running dispute over the location of the shared parish church finally split the town in two — North Andover was set off and incorporated as its own municipality on April 7, 1855, keeping the historic town center, or Old Center, as its own. That Old Center, laid out around the First (Old) Burying Ground and meetinghouse, still anchors the town today; a Village Improvement Association formed by wealthy Centre Village landowners in 1885 remains active, and the North Andover Center Historic District preserves its Colonial- and Federal-era core.

Water and machinery built the rest of the town. Captain Nathaniel Stevens opened a woolen mill in Centre Village in 1813, and the Stevens family's textile fortune eventually funded the Stevens-Coolidge Place — the 91-acre former Stevens family farm at 153 Chickering Road that Helen Stevens Coolidge and her diplomat husband John Gardner Coolidge used as a summer estate from 1914 to 1962, now a National Register property with formal gardens open to the public through the Trustees of Reservations. A second, larger wave of industry grew up along the Cochichewick Brook: the Davis & Furber Machine Company, manufacturer of woolen-mill machinery, moved to what became known as Machine Shop Village in 1836 and operated there until 1982, by the end the last U.S. maker of textile carding equipment; the mill village's worker and manager housing is preserved as the Machine Shop Village Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1982. Lake Cochichewick itself, a 560-acre kettle pond that is the largest lake in Essex County, has served as the town's public drinking-water reservoir for its roughly 30,000 residents ever since, which is why swimming in the lake is banned townwide even as trails along its shore remain open to hikers.

Higher education arrived after World War II: the Augustinian religious order, at the invitation of Boston's Archbishop Richard Cushing, chartered what became Merrimack College in North Andover in March 1947 to serve returning G.I.'s, and it remains one of only two Augustinian colleges in the country alongside Villanova. Brooks School, a 270-acre Episcopal boarding and day school founded in 1926 by Groton's Endicott Peabody, sits directly on Lake Cochichewick and enrolls roughly 370 students in grades 9–12. Today North Andover pairs that institutional and industrial history with a competitive, family-oriented housing market: Redfin rated it a 91-out-of-100 'Most Competitive' market in mid-2026, with homes selling in a median of 22 days and about 60% of sales closing above list price — a legacy mill town that has become one of the Merrimack Valley's most sought-after places to live within easy reach of both Boston and the coast.