ge lord fifty years after the
Declaration of Independence, the town has preserved a Cranford-like
charm. And why not, when the very house is still handsomely preserved,
where the nameless nobleman, Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the
floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's novel, very properly
capped the climax by marrying his brave little protector, Molly Wilder?
Why not, when the Lincoln family, ancestors of Abraham, has been
identified with the town since its settlement? The house of
Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who received the sword of Cornwallis at
Yorktown, is still occupied by his descendants, its neat fence, many
windows, two chimneys, and its two stories and a half proclaiming it a
dwelling of repute. Near by, descendants of Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor
of Abraham, occupy part of another roomy ancient homestead. The
Wampatuck Club, named after the Indian chief who granted the original
deeds of the town, has found quarters in an extremely interesting house
dating from 1680. In the spacious living-room are seventeen panels, on
the walls and in the doors, painted with charming old-fashioned skill by
John Hazlitt, the brother of the English essayist. The Reverend Daniel
Shute house, built in 1746, is practically intact with its paneled rooms
and wall-paper a hundred years old. Hingham's famous elms shade the
house where Parson Ebenezer Gay lived out his long pastorate of
sixty-nine years and nine months, and the Garrison house, built before
1640, sheltered, in its prime, nine generations of the same family. The
Rainbow Roof house, so called from the delicious curve in its roof, is
one of Hingham's prettiest two-hundred-year-old cottages, and Miss Susan
B. Willard's cottage is one of the oldest in the United States. Derby
Academy, founded almost two centuries and a half ago by Madam Derby,
still maintains its social and scholarly prestige through all the
educational turmoil of the twentieth century. One likes to associate
Hingham with Massachusetts's stanch and sturdy "war governor," for it
was here that John Albion Andrew, who proved himself so truly one of our
great men during the Civil War, courted Eliza Jones Hersey, and here
that the happy years of their early married life were spent. Later,
another governor, John D. Long, was for many years a mighty figure in
the town.

With its ancient churches and institutions, its pensive graveyards and
lovely elms, its ancestral houses and hidden gardens,