Category: Hingham, Massachusetts

Categories: Suffolk County, Massachusetts | Plymouth County, Massachusetts | Massachusetts Bay Colony

Hingham is a town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Originally it was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (not the Plymouth Colony). From 1643 to 1793, it was in Suffolk County. From 1793 to 1803, it was in Norfolk County. Since 1803 it has been in Plymouth County.

Hingham in Massachusetts to the south of where Boston now is lay the great country of Chickatabut, Chief Sachem of the Massachusetts Indians, who were a branch of the great Algonquin tribe. He ruled as far south as the present town of Duxbury, from where there stretched south and west the territory of Massasoit, Chief of the Wampanoags. A great sickness, some years previously, had depopulated their lands, and neither chief, openly at least, objected to the settlement of his territory by the whites. As early as 1633, what was then known as Bare Cove, now as Hingham, was settled by a few men from Hingham, Eng. That same year arrived Edmund Hobart, a goodly and pious man, who, having examined Bare Cove, finally settled there in 1635. Soon after his son, the Reverend Peter Hobart, arrived with a large congregation, and Bare Cove became a town under the name of the beloved home city from which the people had been driven. Each year brought fresh accessions to the numbers of the settlers. In April, 1637, Charles, aroused at the large number of departures of emigrants from England to America, made a proclamation which forebade any, except such as would conform, from leaving the kingdom. Wherethe people had been leaving England openly, they now departed by stealth, so that the numbers of the colonists kept increasing.

Resources

• Town website
• Tackling Hingham vital records, by Alicia Crane Williams, October 29, 2014. This blog posting has good advice on various sources for Hingham records.
• History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts (The Town of Hingham, Massachusetts, 1893)
• Lincoln, Solomon. History of the Town of Hingham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts (Caleb Gill, Jr. and Farmer and Brown, 1827)
• Hobart's Journal

See also: Category: Hingham, Norfolk (many of the earliest settlers of Hingham came from there)

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