October 14, 2021 by jsusanp

Happy 275th Anniversary, Second Parish

The congregation of Second Parish in Hingham is celebrating its 275th anniversary this year. Second Parish, like Hingham, has a rich history. It was founded in 1746 as one of the churches of the “Standing Order” of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These meetinghouses and their ministers were supported by taxes levied upon the citizens.

In 1727, due to the distance from the downtown meetinghouse, Hingham’s First Parish or what we know as Old Ship, the inhabitants of Glad Tidings Plain began to agitate for religious services in South Hingham during the winter. Each of their proposals was refused. By 1738, they requested to be set off into their own parish and precinct. This caused much controversy, as downtown residents who also owned farmland in South Hingham would be taxed to support two churches if this occurred. Undaunted and rebellious, the residents of South Hingham, led by Theophilus Cushing (1703-1779), decided to build their own meetinghouse.

Cushing gave the land, and Solomon Loring and others provided the building materials. The frame was raised June 22, 1742. The original church was a simple rectangular structure with pews owned by parishioners on the first floor and galleries upstairs. Now the inhabitants had a meetinghouse, but no preacher and no public money to pay one. They continued to petition the Great and General Court in 1744 and 1745. Finally, on March 21, 1746, the parish was established. Reverend Daniel Shute (1722-1802) was called as minister and served for over 50 years.

Conceptual drawing of Second Parish, 1742

Rev. Shute’s sermon at Rev. Gay’s interment.

During the Revolutionary War, Reverend Shute was an ardent patriot, but remained a steadfast friend of Reverend Ebenezer Gay (1696-1787) of Old Ship, who was a loyalist. The two pastors exchanged pulpits, with the Shute traveling up Main Street to preach at Old Ship while Gay went down to South Hingham to do the same. When Ebenezer Gay died in 1787 at the age of 90, Daniel Shute preached at his burial. His son, Dr. Daniel Shute (1756-1829), was a surgeon in the Continental Army and served under Alexander Hamilton and Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln.

As America developed as a new country, Second Parish also grew. In 1792, a bell tower was added, and in 1829, the entrance to the church moved to the Main Street side. It was not until 1889 that the four-faced tower clock was installed. Reverend John Lewis Russell, minister from 1842 to 1849, was an ardent abolitionist and was instrumental in hosting an Anti-Slavery Convention in the meetinghouse on August 1, 1850. Reverend Allen Gary Jennings, minister from 1870 to 1881, served in the Civil War as a young man as did many from the congregation.

Second Parish with tower and new front doors, sometime prior to 1889

Streetcars pass along Main Street by Second Parish, c. 1900

In the Twentieth Century Second Parish and New North Church shared ministers from 1900 until 1912. Second Parish supported America’s entry into both the First and Second World Wars; however, the church closed in 1944 as it was difficult to hire ministers. While closed, the parish continued to run Sunday School using Wilder Hall across the street. The parish reopened in 1946. In 1956, a neighboring barn was moved to the back of the church. The barn was converted into a social hall called Cushing Hall, and a kitchen and minister’s study were added. In 2017, an accessible entrance was completed allowing all to enter and leave the building with ease and dignity. Each addition to Second Parish has met the needs of the current parishioners and has improved upon the building while maintaining the historic character of the original meetinghouse.

Today Second Parish is an active house of worship with a strong commitment to service. The church houses the Hingham Food Pantry and AA meetings, and donates 50% of its plate collections each month to a variety of local charities. The entire congregation participates in placing flags on veterans’ graves at the High Street Cemetery the Sunday before Memorial Day. The Second Parish Arts Festival in May and the Fall Pumpkin Patch are two popular church events enjoyed by the public. Second Parish cherishes its history and continues the tradition started by Reverend Daniel Shute and Reverend Ebenezer Gay of exchanging pulpits. Reverend Stephanie Shute Kelsch and Reverend Ken Read Brown, both of whom are descendants of the first ministers of their churches, enjoy this annual opportunity to preach to each other’s congregations.

July 9, 2020 by pbagger

Whiting Memorial Chapel Honored with Preservation Award

Each year, the Hingham Historical Society awards its W. Bradford Sprout, Jr., Architectural Award in recognition of a notable project involving the rehabilitation, restoration or preservation of an historic structure or property in the town of Hingham. This past spring, at a “virtual” Annual Meeting of the Society, the award was presented to the Trustees of High Street Cemetery for their restoration of Whiting Memorial Chapel.

Albert Turner Whiting in front of the newly constructed chapel, 1905.

Albert Turner Whiting commission this stone chapel, completed in 1905, in memory of his parents, Albert and Sarah Fearing Whiting, and his wife Harriet E. (Warren) Whiting, who died in January 1905, while the chapel was under construction. Whiting had already lost his only child, Helen, in 1891. All are buried in High Street Cemetery.

Harriet Whiting Memorial Window.

J. Sumner Fowler, a Hingham resident and architect, designed Whiting Chapel. (He, too, is buried in High Street Cemetery.) The chapel is in the Gothic Revival style, popular nationally–think college campuses–although there are no other examples of the stye in Hingham. The chapel was constructed of Weymouth seam-faced granite with Indiana limestone trimming. It has a copper roof and double oak doors.

The interior features oak paneled walls and copious stained glass, including an ornate window in the apse, in memory of Whiting’s wife, Harriet E. (Warren) Whiting, who died in early 1905.

The Whitings (sometimes also Whitons) were a large and important family in South Hingham. Albert Whiting (Albert Turner’s father) built an Italianate Revival house that once stood at 1194 Main Street, just north of Queen Anne Corner.

Albert Whiting’s House at 1194 Main Street.

The elder Albert Whiting was a master mason, who was superintendent of stone work on many large public projects, including the Charlestown Navy Yard dry docks; Castle Island in South Boston; Fort Independence in Hull; and industrial canals for the Lowell Lock and Canal Co. His son, Albert Turner Whiting, had a peripatetic youth, as his father’s trade required the family to move to these large building sites. It is no wonder, then, that when the younger Albert came to commission a chapel in his parents’ honor, the result was one of Hingham’s only stone buildings.

Fowler, the architect, designed many well-known Hingham and South Shore buildings, including the former Town Offices at 14 Main Street and Ames Chapel in Hingham Cemetery, also recently restored. That chapel could not be more different, though, having been designed in 1887 in the then-popular, richly ornamented Queen Anne style.

High Street Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in South Hingham. Its earliest extant headstone dates from 1688. Through the mid-19^th century, it was the responsibility of Hingham’s Second Parish. It passed into private hands and was incorporated in 1855.

Restoration worked focused on interior and exterior wall repair due to leaks; floor repair; pew cleaning; and the repair and restoration of stained glass. The oak doors and paneling were stripped and restained and an HVAC system was installed. This work, performed by Ben Wilcox and Wilcox Construction, was funded by the Trustees’ endowment and a grant from the CPC. The Trustees sought to restore the building for use for private events, and, as restored it comfortably seats 80.

The Trustees’ work makes a significant and beautiful building available to the Town, and for that we were pleased to honor the Trustees with the Sprout award. Although outside of the public eye, owing to social distancing measures, the Trustees were awarded a plaque commemorating the award. Special thanks to Aisling Gallery, which generously donated framing services, and Susan Kilmartin, for sharing her calligraphy skills.

Whiting Memorial Chapel in High Street Cemetery, 2019.

May 28, 2020 by Rosamund Conroy

The Construction of the New Meetinghouse: Old Ship Church

By Rosamund Conroy

Early New England meetinghouses were the hearts of towns, serving not only as places of worship but also municipal buildings and even forts or garrisons. These basic structures hosted a variety of activities—from town meetings and trials to baptisms—and the original settlers were generally prohibited from building their homes more than a half a mile away from their town’s meetinghouse.

Hingham’s first meetinghouse was constructed shortly after the incorporation of the town, on the site where the Hingham Heritage Museum and Visitor Center now stands. It had a palisade fence, a bell and was probably a rough-hewn, unheated timber structure, similar to many others of that time.

In January 1679, perhaps in a nod to its growing population and increasing wealth, the town voted to replace the old meetinghouse and build a new one “with all convenient speed.” They established a small committee to visit other towns for ideas and by May 1680 (the new year being in March under the Julian calendar), the town voted to build the new meetinghouse—the structure we now know as Old Ship Church— “where the old one doth stand.”

The vote was split though and the location proved controversial, with several powerful freemen preferring a different site. Despite the discord, other aspects of the project proceeded and in August 1680, the town agreed the building’s dimensions. In October 1680, they established the rates (the contribution per man, proportional to their assessed wealth) for a project total of about £437—an enormous sum of money in those days. At nearly £16, the highest rate payer was Daniel Cushing Snr. Esq., while many of the younger or poorer men “promised” a £1 contribution, vowing to pay it at a future date.

An excerpt from the Daniel Cushing Manuscript (1680’s) showing the total rate collected for the meetinghouse. The selectmen listed above held opposing views as to where the meetinghouse should be situated. Only photocopies survive from this part of the manuscript.
*(Hingham Historical Society archives/Photo: R. Conroy)*

The next spring arrived yet the location continued to be a thorny issue. In May 1681, the General Court got involved and sent two members, William Stoughton and Joseph Dudley, to view both sites. (Interestingly, Dudley would later be widely reviled throughout the colony for his role in the short-lived government of Sir Edmund Andros.) The men found both locations unsuitable and disallowed the construction of the new meetinghouse in “either the old place or in the plaine.” Governor Simon Bradstreet and the magistrates ordered another town meeting to resolve the issue and directed the selectmen to give them a “speedy returne” about the outcome.

A compromise was reached when Captain Joshua Hobart donated a parcel of land for the meetinghouse. It was near to the old site but presumably more agreeable to all parties and an affirmative vote was duly passed at the subsequent town meeting. The meetinghouse frame was raised over three days in July and its first use was civic, for a town meeting on January 5, 1681. At that meeting, a committee was established to agree upon the seating arrangements in the new meetinghouse—a complicated task that involved segregation by sex and ordering by social hierarchy.

A few days later, on January 8, 1681, the new meetinghouse—now known as the Old Ship Church—held its first Sabbath service, a tradition that continues to this day.

An excerpt from the Daniel Cushing manuscript (1680’s) showing the rate that each man paid, plus their seat in the meetinghouse. Hinghamites sat on seats (benches), not pews and the order presumably applied to all occasions, civil or religious. Only photocopies survive from this part of the manuscript.
(Hingham Historical Society archives/Photo: R. Conroy)

Would you like to know more? For a general overview of life in seventeenth-century New England, Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer provides an interesting social history of the English folkways that shaped America’s colonies. Food buffs will enjoy reading America’s Founding Food by Stavely and Fitzgerald, whereas Good Wives by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich provides a glimpse into the hidden world of Puritan women.

Primary source materials can be as engrossing as edited works and they often bring a particular historical period to life in unexpected ways. A wealth of seventeenth-century primary sources can be found locally (try the Hingham Historical Society, the Hingham Public Library or the Massachusetts Historical Society) as well as online (for example, in the digital records at the Massachusetts State Archives).

October 12, 2019 by geriduff

Moving House

Back in 1946 there was a bit of a housing shortage. Hingham dentist Ross Vroom bought a two-story Garrison colonial house on Gallops Island and had it placed on a barge and floated over to World’s End. He had a cellar dug at 22 Seal Cove Road, and the house still sits there today.

Dr. Vroom was no stranger to having a good house moved. Back in 1933 he moved the stately “Squire Norton House” from its original location at 65 Main Street across Hingham Square to 47 Fearing Road and lived there for many years.

Both of these photos are from the archives of the Hingham Historical Society.

November 10, 2016 by pbagger

Signs of “nature’s god” at the Ebenezer Gay house

When a local developer purchased the Rev. Ebenezer Gay (1696-1787) house at 89 North Street, local historian John P. Richardson participated in some pre-construction historical investigations. These painted panels from the Gay house, later installed in the 1690 Old Fort House which Mr. Richardson owned and occupied, are now part of the John P. Richardson Collection at the Hingham Historical Society.

Wall Fragment from the Ebenezer Gay House. John P. Richardson Collection, Hingham Historical Society.

The first wall fragment is made of a plaster and lath surface attached to heavy vertical boards, which are in turn attached to two more modern boards horizontally laid. The decorative side is painted a dirty off-white base with a meandering vine ad flower motif that originates out of a basket or planter decorated in a cross hatch pattern with dots in each diamond of the crosshatch. The basket rests on a hilly green stylized landscape. The vine bears large, stylized acanthus-type leaves and flowers of varying shapes in red and blue. Five hand-cut nails protrude from the wall—two at the far left, one at the top center, one at the upper right, one at mid-right.

Wall Fragment from the Ebenezer Gay House. John P. Richardson Collection, Hingham Historical Society.

The second decoratively painted wall fragment consists of two layers of plaster and lath encasing two heavy vertical boards. The plaster side is painted with at least 2 layers of paint, the topmost having been added by a 20^th century Gay family member seeking to restore the design. The original background was green, while the background of the current surface layer is a dirty tan color.

A meandering vine motif climbs the panel, with the vine bearing red tulip-shaped blue lily-shaped flowers. At right is a narrow border set off by a dark brown line. Within the border the flower and vine motif repeats in a narrower scale. To the right of the border is an unfinished area of white plaster with two maroon colored squares of paint laid out in a windowpane pattern.

In his book, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, author Robert J. Wilson III described the Gay house at it looked during the years that Ebenezer lived there with his wife, Jerusha (Bradford) Gay and their ten children:

The house was a 2-1/2 story, rectangular, pitched-roof affair, somewhat large for the period, but not ostentatiously so. Though it was painted a rather austere blue-gray on the outside, the interior was lively and colorful. Someone (Jerusha?) adorned the cream colored walls of the family sitting room with a free hand vine design, very like eighteenth-century crewelwork. The woodwork, fireplace wall, and the wainscott (added later) were all painted a light green. The whole effect suggested that nature’s god in all his vibrancy was very much alive in the Gay house.

September 27, 2016 by suzannebuchanan

A Crow Point Cottage

Clambake Pavilion, Melville Garden on Crow Point, Hingham

One of the earliest surviving structures on Hingham’s Crow Point, the house at 7 Merrill Street was erected around 1860, most likely as a worker’s cottage. This was shortly after Dorchester industrialist Samuel Downer (1807-1881) bought up most of Crow Point as the site for a proposed kerosene factory. After the Civil War, Downer took his real estate investment along Hingham Harbor in a different direction and opened Melville Garden, a Victorian amusement park, in 1871.

Daniel Frasier

This changed the fortunes of the cottage as well. Its first recorded owner, Isadore Smart of Cambridge, appears to have rented the house as early as 1879 to a company, also from Cambridge, called “Frasier and Smith,” which manufactured felt covers for piano key hammers. Its main operations were located in Cambridge, but perhaps there was a good market for his wares in the music halls of Melville Garden.

The Frasier and Grozier cottages alone on Merrill St. in 1892.

By 1892, the house was also serving as a summer cottage for Daniel Frasier, owner of the firm, and his family. The families of Edwin Grozier and William Covill lived next door in the so-called “Jones Cottage.” Grozier, editor and owner of the Boston Post, had once been Joseph Pulitzer’s private secretary. Grozier and Frasier were active in the same Cambridge social circles. The three families had Merrill Street to themselves and could watch the steamboats come in to Downer’s Wharf from their back porches.

Crow Point seen from Hingham Harbor c. 1900. 7 Merrill is visible behind the sailboat’s mast.

Along with a few similar cottages dotting its hillsides, Crow Point boasted four mansions by the 1890s. Living conditions were rather primitive, however: modern sewer service was not introduced until the late 1940s. During much of this period, Crow Point’s cottages served principally as summer rentals for Boston families.

The hexagonal pavilion salvaged from Melville Garden, shown in 1956

Melville Garden was closed and dismantled in 1896. It might have been Daniel Frasier who moved on of the old Melville Garden pavilions to the north corner of the house at that time.

In 1897, Crow Point was surveyed and subdivided into residential building lots. The lots were small, and it appears that few were purchased singly. Amid this development, the property at 7 Merrill Street only reappears in Plymouth County title records in 1944. That year, it was purchased by George and Margaret Knight, who also purchased the adjacent Jones cottage . The Knights tore down the Jones cottage in 1956 and doubled the size of 7 Merrill the following year, making it a comfortable, modern year-round home.

The Jones Cottage before it was razed, 1956

7 Merrill after the Jones Cottage came down, 1956

A photo from 1956, just before the Knights began their renovations, shows the Jones cottage before it was razed. It was at the time similar in size and style to 7 Merrill, and, though it would be considered impractically small by today’s standards, no fewer than eight members of the Grozier and Covill families spent the summer of 1892 there together.

The Knights moved the main entrance to 7 Merrill to the driveway side to accommodate easier access from a car. The current owners have restored the entrance to the front of the house, where it was originally located, and added the portico and an extra chimney for symmetry. Also new is the extension to the living room overlooking Hingham Harbor and an inviting rear terrace.

The house at 7 Merrill will be a featured stop on the Hingham Historical Society‘s 92nd Historic House Tour on Sunday, October 2, 2016.

7 Merrill’s mansard roof is one of the remnants of original construction. After the Civil War, the style became popular with rich and poor alike because it provided a full attic for living space. The stately portico and fish-scale shingles are modern enhancements.

Out of the Archives

Exploring the Archives at the Hingham Heritage Museum

Category Archives: Buildings