A Short History of Scituate

Kent Street, 1627

In 1627 or 1628 a group from Plymouth, joined by new arrivals from the County of Kent in England, made the first permanent settlement here. They chose their ground carefully. The shore is marked by four water-washed gravel cliffs, and good planting land lay behind them, so the settlers laid out their village about a mile back from the coast and ran a public way through it. They called that way Kent Street, after the county most of them had left. It still carries the name, four hundred years later.

1636, and the Right to Elect Officers

For the first years the settlement answered to the General Court at Plymouth for everything. Then in 1636 the population had grown enough that the General Court gave the town permission to elect certain officers and, to some extent, carry on its own affairs. That grant of permission is the act Scituate calls its incorporation. It is worth reading that sentence slowly: the town’s founding document is not a declaration of independence, it is a decision by a larger government to let residents choose their own officials. Everything on this website descends from it.

The Conihasset Partners

When the General Court set Scituate’s bounds it did something odd. It reserved the whole northern part of town, from Satuit Brook up to the Conihasset marshes, for the exclusive benefit of three men: Hatherly, Beauchamp and Shirley. Settlers were already living on some of that land, the bounds were vague, and the arguments ran for years. Hatherly eventually bought the other two out, and in 1646 he divided the tract into thirty shares, keeping a quarter of them and selling the rest for 180 pounds to a group who became known as the Conihasset Partners.

The Partners then ran themselves like a government. They built their own roads and kept their own records, inside a town they were legally part of, and the town raised no objection, probably because the same men were prominent in running Scituate anyway. Their last meeting was held in 1767, after which their affairs reverted to the town. That is a hundred and twenty years of a private company holding public functions inside a New England town, and it ended without a fight.

The Town That Gave Land Away Three Times

Scituate is smaller than it was, and every reduction came from residents in one part of town wanting to govern themselves. In 1717 a portion of the original grant was separated and incorporated as the town of Hanover. In 1788 the section called the Two Mile, which was really part of Marshfield, was ceded back. In 1849 the western part broke away as South Scituate, and later changed its name to Norwell in honor of a benefactor. In every case the parent town let it happen without serious opposition.

What Scituate kept was the coast: several miles of shoreline and beaches that were once considered a useless liability and are now the most valuable property in town.

A Slow Town, Then a Fast One

For its first two centuries Scituate barely grew. Bad roads and hard travel sent new arrivals to the cities instead. The railroad reached town in 1871 and helped a little, but as late as 1900 the population hardly exceeded 2,000. It took the automobile and better roads to change that, and by the 1960 census the town held between eleven and twelve thousand people. Today it is just over 19,000, which means most of Scituate’s growth has happened within living memory.

What Is Still Standing

Scituate keeps its history in buildings rather than in archives alone. Scituate Lighthouse stands at the harbor entrance. The Old Oaken Bucket Homestead and Well, Lawson Tower, Stockbridge Mill and the Cudworth House are all still here, and the Little Red School House is the home of the Scituate Historical Society. The town commemorates its founding every August with Heritage Days, and the Town Pier still supports a working fishing fleet, which is a rarer thing on this coast than it used to be.