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South of Boston and Cape Cod, New Bedford was the heart of the global whaling industry in the 19th century, with 80% of the nation’s whale ships, and factories turning whale oil into candles and whale bone into corset frames and umbrellas. This heritage is remembered in the excellent Whaling Museum, with displays on the history of whaling, a large collection of mounds, a whaling ship, whale skeletons and whaling film. It is also worth seeing if the Beetian Sailors featured in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and in 1834, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House with decorative arts, antique furniture and expansive gardens. Take a self-guided walk along the waterfront, preserved as Whale National Historical Park, and the still active and colorful fishing port.
Nearby Fall River also has a rich history, both a textile center and a shipping port, but perhaps its most famous citizen was Lizzie Borden, whose trial for her alleged murder of her parents still fascinates visitors to the Fall River Historical Society Museum. The Maritime Museum is one of the world’s largest Titanic exhibitions and models of the Fall River Line, a fleet of ferries that carried wealthy passengers from New York and Boston to their summer cottages in Newport. At Battleship Cove, you can travel to New England’s largest floating museum, which includes the battleship USS Massachusetts, PT torpedo boats 796 and 617, USS Lionfish, WWII submarine and USS Destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, who served in Korea. Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
