Topsfield Homes For Sale

Topsfield's English settlement dates to 1635, when colonists moved onto land the Massachusetts Bay Company had purchased from Masconomet, sachem of the Agawam people, in an area first called New Meadows. The Massachusetts General Court renamed the settlement Topsfield in 1648, and the town was formally incorporated in 1650 with an English population of only a few dozen settlers across fewer than a dozen families. Growth stayed slow and agricultural for centuries — roughly 250 residents by 1675, just over 1,000 by 1837.

The town's defining landmark is the Parson Capen House, built in 1683 for Topsfield's second minister and now a National Historic Landmark anchoring the Topsfield Town Common Historic District alongside the 1842 First Congregational Church and 1873 Town Hall. The Puritan era had a darker chapter too: several Topsfield residents were swept up in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, including Elizabeth Howe and Sarah Wildes, both convicted and executed. Farming remained central to local identity, culminating in the Essex Agricultural Society's founding in 1818 — the root of the Topsfield Fair, still held every October and billed today as America's oldest continuously running county fair, drawing an estimated 450,000 to 500,000 visitors over its ten-day run.

Topsfield today is a low-density, largely car-dependent residential town of about 6,500 people, still organized around its 1650s town common, working farms, and thousands of acres of protected land at Bradley Palmer State Park, the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, and Willowdale State Forest. Inventory is thin and prices reflect it: Redfin's own tracking put Topsfield's median sale price at $1.4M in February 2026, while Zillow's smoother typical-home-value estimate runs closer to $934K — a gap that reflects how few homes trade hands in a town this size in any given month, but either figure places Topsfield among the pricier towns surrounding Greater Newburyport.