Local city information for Hingham, MA

Hingham is a town in Plymouth County on the South Shore of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. The population was 19,882 at the 2000 census. Hingham is located southeast of the Boston city limits.

For geographic and demographic information on the census-designated place Hingham, please see the article Hingham (CDP), Massachusetts.

The town of Hingham was dubbed "Bare Cove" by the first colonizing English in 1633, but two years later was incorporated as a town under the name "Hingham". Suffolk County claimed Hingham from its founding in 1635 until 1793; Norfolk County from 1793 to 1803; and Plymouth County from 1803. The eastern part of the town split off to become Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1770. The town was named for Hingham, a village in the English county of Norfolk, East Anglia, from where most of the first colonists came, including Abraham Lincoln's ancestor Samuel Lincoln (1622–90), his first American ancestor, who came to Massachusetts in 1637.
A statue of President Lincoln adorns the area adjacent to downtown Hingham Square.

Hingham was born of religious dissent. Many of the original founders were forced to flee their native village in Norfolk with both their vicars, Rev. Peter Hobart and Rev. Robert Peck, when they fell foul of the strict doctrines of Anglican England. Peck was known for what the eminent Norfolk historian Rev. Francis Blomefield called his "violent schismatical spirit." Peck lowered the chancel railing of the church, in accord with Puritan sentiment that the Anglican church of the day was too removed from its parishioners. He also antagonized ecclesiastical authorities with other forbidden practices.

Hobart, born in Hingham, Norfolk, in 1604 and, like Peck, a graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, sought shelter from the prevailing discipline of the high church among his fellow Puritans. The cost to those who emigrated was steep. They "sold their possessions for half their value", noted a contemporary account, "and named the place of their settlement after their natal town." (The cost to the place they left behind was also high: Hingham was forced to petition Parliament for aid, claiming that the departure of its most well-to-do citizens had left it hamstrung.)

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While most of the early Hingham settlers came from Hingham and other nearby villages in East Anglia, a few Hingham settlers like Anthony Eames came from the West Country of England. The early settlers of Dorchester, Massachusetts, for instance, had come under the guidance of Rev. John White of Dorchester in Dorset, and some of them (like Eames) later moved to Hingham. Accounts from Hingham's earliest years indicate some friction between the disparate groups, culminating in an 1645 episode involving the town's 'Trainband', when some Hingham settlers supported Eames, and others supported Bozoan Allen, a prominent early Hingham settler and Hobart ally who came from King's Lynn in Norfolk, East Anglia. Prominent East Anglian Puritans like the Hobarts and the Cushings, for instance, were used to holding sway in matters of governance. Eventually the controversy became so heated that John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley were drawn into the fray; minister Hobart threatened to excommunicate Eames.

The bitter trainband controversy dragged on for several years, culminating in stiff fines. Eventually a weary Eames, who was in his mid-fifties when the controversy began and who had served Hingham as first militia captain, a selectman, and Deputy in the General Court, threw in the towel and moved to nearby Marshfield where he again served as Deputy and emerged as a leading citizen, despite his brush with the Hingham powers-that-be.

The third town clerk of Hingham was Daniel Cushing, who emigrated to Hingham from Hingham, Norfolk, with his father Matthew in 1638. Cushing's meticulous records of early Hingham enabled subsequent town historians to reconstruct much of early Hingham history as well as that of the early families. Cushing was rather unusual in that he included the town's gossip along with the more conventional formal record-keeping. Cushing's early manuscript was published in 1865, with photographs of his contemporaneous notes on Hingham and its inhabitants entitled "Extracts of the Minutes of Daniel Cushing of Hingham."

The first history of Hingham was written in 1827 by Hingham attorney Solomon Lincoln. In it Lincoln delineated the history of many of the town's landmarks and early families. In subsequent years Solomon Lincoln corresponded with Abraham Lincoln about the future president's Hingham ancestry, of which Abe professed to be ignorant. When Solomon Lincoln suggested that Abe might have forebears in Hingham, Abe responded with dry Lincoln wit that if the town's name was 'Hang'-em' then he probably did have relatives there.

For many years Hingham was the site of the Fall Blast which was the New England Optimist Fall Championship.

Hingham is home to the United States' oldest continuously used house of worship, the Old Ship Church, built in 1681, which currently serves members of the Unitarian Universalist faith. Old Ship Church is the only remaining 17th-century Puritan meeting house in New England. The meeting house derives its name from the roof and ceiling rafters, which resemble an upside-down ship's hull. Many of the builders were ship carpenters, and the form was common throughout East Anglia, the home of many of the town's earliest settlers. The town boasts a wide assortment of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century homes. Many of these may be found in the six historic districts set aside by the town of Hingham.
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Hingham was originally part of Suffolk County, and when the southern part of the county was set off as Norfolk County in 1793, it included the towns of Hingham and Hull. In 1803 those towns opted out of Norfolk County and became part of Plymouth County.

In 1889, a wealthy Hingham resident, John Brewer, commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted to design a residential subdivision on a peninsula Brewer owned adjacent to Hingham Harbor. While Olmsted's tree-lined horse-cart paths were made, the residential buildings were never constructed. After World War II, Hingham was unsuccessful in its bid to have Brewer's peninsula used as the site of the planned United Nations Secretariat building. In later years the site was also considered for a nuclear power plant. In the 1960s, to prevent eventual development, townspeople organized an effort to preserve the peninsula as open space. Today this natural conservation land is called World's End and is maintained by The Trustees of Reservations.

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