Cohasset, Massachusetts
A Short History of Cohasset
A fishing harbor that argued its way out of Hingham in 1770, a rocky shore where Boston Harbor gives way to Massachusetts Bay, and a town that rewrote its own government by a special act of the Legislature in 1997.
1770, and the Town That Left Hingham
Cohasset did not begin as a town. It began as the far northern precinct of Hingham, out on a rocky coast that Captain John Smith had already charted as Quonahasset in 1614. English colonists settled the area around 1670, far enough from Hingham’s meetinghouse that a Sunday service was a long trip, and by the middle of the 1700s the settlement had grown large enough to run its own affairs. In 1770 it was incorporated as the separate Town of Cohasset. The name itself is older than the town: it comes from the Massachusett word Conahasset, understood to mean long rocky place, which is exactly what the coastline is.
A Norfolk County Island
Look at a county map of Massachusetts and Cohasset is the piece that does not fit. It belongs to Norfolk County, but it is cut off from the rest of the county by two Plymouth County towns, Hingham and Hull, so it sits as an exclave, a Norfolk town you cannot reach from the rest of Norfolk without crossing another county. That is a leftover of the eighteenth century arguments over which county each coastal town would answer to, and Cohasset ended up on the far side of the line from its own county seat.
The Harbor and Minot’s Ledge
Cohasset is a coast town before it is anything else. Its harbor, its coves and its offshore ledges shaped the town’s early living, first in fishing and shipbuilding and later in the summer estates that still line the shore. A mile off that shore stands Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse, one of the most famous wave-swept lighthouses in the country, built on a bare rock that the open Atlantic covers at high tide. The rocky ledges that made the harbor dangerous are the same ones that gave the town its name, and they are still the first thing you notice from the water.
1997: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government
Here is the piece of Cohasset history that most directly affects you. For most of its life the town ran on a Board of Selectmen and its own elected officers. Then, in 1997, the Legislature enacted a Town Manager Act for Cohasset, Chapter 34 of the Acts of 1997, and the voters accepted it. The act created a professional Town Manager, appointed by the Select Board, who took over the daily running of the departments and the building of the budget, and it turned several formerly elected offices, the Treasurer-Collector among them, into appointments of the new Manager. The town amended the act again in 2014.
The trade was deliberate: a professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect, in place of a scatter of separately elected department officers. Cohasset kept an unusual number of its boards elected even so, and whether the balance is right is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a special act can be amended the same way it was adopted.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Cohasset Historical Society keeps the town’s manuscripts, artifacts and historic houses, and it is not a passive collection. In 2001 Cohasset voted to adopt the Community Preservation Act, which sets aside money each year for open space, recreation, community housing and historic preservation. Its Community Preservation Committee recommends projects, and Town Meeting votes those recommendations one at a time, which means the preservation of Cohasset’s own history is decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up.
Sources: Wikipedia, Cohasset, Massachusetts; Town of Cohasset, Town Manager Act (Chapter 34 of the Acts of 1997, amended by Chapter 3 of the Acts of 2014), malegislature.gov; Town of Cohasset Community Preservation Committee (cohassetma.gov/867); Cohasset Historical Society; U.S. Census Bureau.