Wickham was founded in 1640, one of the Puritan settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its primary industries were fishing and shipbuilding, augmented in the 18th and 19th centuries by whaling and the South Seas trade. Towards the turn of the 20th century, some light manufacturing was established, but this petered out during the depression of the 1930's, and after a brief resurgence during the Second World War and the economic boom of the 1950's, the factories closed down entirely. The population shrank to a few thousand by 1960, and for about half a century, the town subsisted on a meager fishing and tourism trade.
A new chapter in Wickham's history began in the early 21st century, when the Ikibomot Corporation, a Japanese company known worldwide for its pioneering high-tech industrial initiatives, purchased a large parcel of abandoned land in the town on which to build its research and development headquarters.
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