Hingham, Massachusetts and the Boston Harbor Islands

Hingham, Massachusetts

As the author of the Cutler Family Chronicles, I had no trouble selecting Hingham as the home town of the American branch of the Cutler Family. (The English branch hails from Fareham, England and the West Indian island of Barbados.) Hingham was where my family and I lived for sixteen years and where we still have a wealth of friends and memories. While a resident there I served on a publishing committee offering oversight and insight to an official history of the town entitled Not All Is Changed. Much of what I learned during the course of that initiative is scattered throughout the volumes of the Chronicles, lending what I trust is a sense of authenticity to the descriptions and history of a New England seaside village.

Old Ship Church

Founded in 1633 as Bare Cove, Hingham was incorporated in 1635 under its new name. Many of the early settlers—including Samuel Lincoln, an ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln—fled from Hingham, England to America in search of religious freedom. In 1681, they built a meeting house on lower Main Street in the shape of an upside-down ship’s lull. That building stands today as Old Ship's Church and is the oldest continuously used house of worship in America. It is also the only remaining Puritan meeting house in New England.

At the outbreak of rebellion in 1775, many residents of Hingham were Tories, that is, they remained loyal to England. However, British blunders and excessive punishments for perceived offenses against the Crown persuaded most Hingham Tories to turn coat and become patriots. In the Cutler family, eldest son Will Cutler was seized by the British off Marblehead and dragged off his family’s merchant brig to serve in the Royal Navy. Soon thereafter, as the mandated sentence for striking a ship’s officer, he was whipped to shreds and then hanged from a larboard yardarm. When contrite British authorities in Boston delivered Will’s tortured body to his father, there was no longer any doubt as to where Cutler loyalties would henceforth lie. Will’s younger brother Richard spends the remaining years of the war in a personal quest for revenge.

Gen. Benjamin Lincoln

During the Revolutionary War (or the war with England, as it was then called), Hingham saw little of the war’s brutal devastations. In fact, not long after the British garrison evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, the theater of war shifted to the southern states, thus sparing most of New England from the rebellion’s fury. Hingham’s main claim to fame in the conflict comes from one of its prominent citizens, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. Lincoln was one of General Washington’s best and most trusted senior officers. At the Battle of Yorktown, he served as Washington’s second-in-command and it was he who accepted Lord Cornwallis’s sword of surrender.

Because the South Shore town of Hingham is located only about an hour’s sail from Boston (assuming fair winds), in early colonial times it became an important commercial center, much like Salem on Boston’s North Shore. In the Chronicles, the Cutler family maintains a small shipping office in Hingham and a much larger one on Boston’s Long Wharf, from where it manages its global commercial interests. Sailing back and forth by boat was rarely a challenge, courtesy of the thirty-four islands (six of which are in Hingham Bay or Hingham Harbor) that, combined with the long, narrow Nantasket peninsula, provide a protective barrier for the eastern and southern extremities of greater Boston Harbor. Today, these jewels of islands offer a tourist’s dream of hiking trails, beaches and historic forts, and are easily accessible by ferries and shuttle boars operating out of Boston, Hingham and other coastal communities.

World's End

A visit to these islands is highly recommended. So is a visit to Hingham and its scenic South Shore neighbors of Cohasset, Hull, Scituate, Duxbury and Plymouth. When in Hingham, be sure to stop by World’s End, a 250-acre peninsula jutting into Hingham Bay that offers spectacular views of sea and fields and groves of trees. What is now a state park and conservation area was designed in part by Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park. In 1945, World’s End was considered as a site for the headquarters of the newly formed United Nations.


Photo credits [all public domain]: Old Ship Church, 19th Century woodcut by Hosea Sprague; General Benjamin Lincoln, painted by Charles Willson Peale; World's End, Hingham, Massachusetts, USA. Landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.