Hull, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hull
A peninsula the Massachusett people called Nantasket, one of the Commonwealth’s oldest towns, a beach that once held a whole amusement park, and a town that has owned its own electric company since 1894.
Nantasket, and 1644
The Massachusett people called this peninsula Nantasket, and Plymouth Colony traders were using it as early as 1622, two years after the Mayflower landed across the bay. The town was incorporated in 1644 and named for Kingston upon Hull in England. Its early living came from the water: fishing, trade, and salvaging the ships that wrecked on the harbor’s shoals. That last trade grew into something larger, because the people who pulled cargo off wrecks also pulled out crews.
The Lifesavers
Hull’s most famous resident never held elected office. Joshua James led lifesaving crews here for the Massachusetts Humane Society and the U.S. Life-Saving Service, two of the services that were merged to form the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard considers him a father of the service. The Hull Lifesaving Museum, founded in 1978 on Nantasket Avenue, keeps that story, and it teaches it the Hull way: its youth programs put teenagers in open water rowing boats on the same harbor.
Paragon Park
In 1905 an amusement park opened along Nantasket Beach, and for most of a century Paragon Park was the reason greater Boston came to Hull on a summer Saturday. The park is gone, but its carousel is not: sixty-six carved wooden horses and two Roman chariots still turn beside the beach, preserved and operated by the Friends of the Paragon Carousel. In May 2026, Town Meeting voted Community Preservation Act money toward restoring the carousel’s clock tower, which means the survival of Hull’s most famous ride is decided in the same room as the town budget.
The Town That Owns Its Power
Hull Municipal Light Plant has generated or bought the town’s electricity since 1894, run by the town itself rather than a private utility. In late December 2001 it raised a 660 kilowatt turbine at Windmill Point, the first commercial scale wind turbine to go online anywhere on the East Coast, and a second, larger turbine followed on the capped landfill in 2006. Both machines aged out: the first was removed in February 2024, and crews brought the second down in December 2025 after replacement parts could not be found. The utility itself keeps running, and who controls it is a live civic question, decided by charter, by Town Meeting, and by the Legislature.
1989, 1993, and a Vote in 2026
Here is the piece of Hull history that most directly affects you. In 1989 the Legislature enacted Hull’s charter, Chapter 8 of the Acts of 1989, creating the Select Board, Town Manager and open Town Meeting form the town still uses. In 1993 an amendment moved day to day control of the light plant from the elected Light Board to the appointed Town Manager. And on May 4, 2026, Town Meeting voted 236 to 82 to petition the Legislature to move it back. The petition now sits with the town’s own state representative. A charter can be amended the same way it was adopted, and Hull is amending its own, article by article, in a room any registered voter can enter.
Sources: Town of Hull charter, Chapter 8 of the Acts of 1989 with the 1993 Municipal Light Plant amendment (town.hull.ma.us DocumentCenter 870); Town of Hull 2026 Annual Town Meeting results (DocumentCenter 2532); The Hull Times, December 11, 2025 and July 2, 2026; Hull Municipal Light Plant (hullmlp.com); Hull Lifesaving Museum; Friends of the Paragon Carousel; RERL Case Study, Hull Wind One; Wikipedia, Hull, Massachusetts.