Hingham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hingham
From a shoreline the English called Bare Cove, to a meeting house that has stood on Main Street since 1681, to the night Town Meeting decided the town would own the wires overhead.
Bare Cove, 1633
The first English colonists here called the place Bare Cove. Two years later, in 1635, it was incorporated as a town and renamed Hingham, after a market town in the English county of Norfolk that most of the first colonists had come from. One of them, Samuel Lincoln, arrived in 1637 and became the first American ancestor of Abraham Lincoln. A statue of the president stands beside downtown Hingham Square today, which is a strange thing to find in a Massachusetts town center until you know why it is there.
The Building That Two Town Meetings Argued About
By the 1670s the congregation had outgrown its old thatched meeting house, and the question of where to put the new one took two heated town meetings to settle. The frame went up on July 26, 1681, on land given by Capt. Joshua Hobart. The town appropriated 430 pounds for it and assessed every freeman toward the cost according to what he was worth, in amounts running from one pound to fifteen. Rev. Peter Hobart, who founded the congregation and served it for 44 years, had died in January 1679 and never saw it finished.
That building is still there, at 90 Main Street, and it is the only remaining 17th century Puritan meeting house in the United States. It is a National Historic Landmark and it still holds services. The thing worth carrying away is not its age. It is that the most famous building in Hingham exists in the spot it does because a room full of residents argued about it and then voted, which is exactly how Hingham still decides where its money goes.
A Skirmish Over Hay
During the Siege of Boston in 1775, a Hingham Loyalist named Elisha Leavitt owned islands out in the harbor and encouraged British forces to use one of them to gather hay for their horses. What followed, the Battle of Grape Island, came a month after Lexington and Concord and just under a month before Bunker Hill. The town has not forgotten it: on May 5, 2026, the Select Board voted to proclaim Sunday, May 17, 2026 as Battle of Grape Island Day in Hingham.
The Town That Gave Away Its Eastern Half
Hingham used to be bigger. In 1770 its eastern part split off and became Cohasset. The town also spent its first century and a half in Suffolk County, alongside Boston, and only moved into Plymouth County in 1803. So two of the lines on the map around you, the Cohasset border and the county you file your deeds in, are both younger than the meeting house on Main Street.
1893: The Town Buys the Wires
Electricity arrived in Hingham the way it arrived everywhere, through a private company. What happened next was less usual. In 1893 Town Meeting voted, twice, for the town to assume control of its own electric utility. The following year Hingham bought every pole, wire and piece of equipment from the Weymouth Light and Power Company for $12,000 and opened for business with 58 customers and 300 streetlights.
That utility is still the town’s. It is governed by a three-person Board of Commissioners that Hingham voters elect, which means the people who set the rate on your family’s electric bill are on the same ballot as the Select Board, and one of those seats was filled at the 2026 town election. Massachusetts has about 40 municipal utilities. Most towns do not get to vote on their power company.
World’s End
John Brewer bought the peninsula at the north end of town in 1855 and in 1886 hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design a residential subdivision on it. The carriage roads were cut and the trees planted. The houses were never built. In 1945 the same 251 acres were proposed as the site of the new United Nations headquarters, and New York was chosen instead. In 1967 the northern two thirds of the peninsula was acquired by the Trustees of Reservations and opened to the public, and in 1996 it became part of the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. Four drumlins, 4.5 miles of paths, and a skyline view of the city that almost never happened.
Sources: Old Ship Church (First Parish in Hingham, Unitarian Universalist); Hingham Municipal Lighting Plant; The Trustees of Reservations; Hingham Select Board minutes, May 5 and May 19, 2026; Office of the Hingham Town Clerk, Town Election Final Results, May 2, 2026; U.S. Census Bureau; Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.