thout yokes
or rings, upon the town's common land."

But the Massachusetts Bay Colony was hard-headed as well as pious, and
several naive hints creep into the early records of sharers of the
Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the salt land of Cohasset. A real
estate transfer of 1640 has this potential flavor: "Half the lot at
Conehasset, if any fall by lot, and half the commons which belong to
said lot." And again, four years later, Henry Tuttle sold to John
Fearing "what right he had to the Division of Conihassett Meadows." The
first land to come under the measuring chain and wooden stake of
surveyors was about the margin of Little Harbor about the middle of the
seventeenth century. After that the rest of the township was not long in
being parceled out. One of the curious methods of land division was in
the Beechwood district. The apportionment seems to have had the
characteristics of ribbon cake. Sections of differing desirability--to
meet the demands of justice and natural conditions--were measured out in
long strips, a mile long and twenty-five feet wide. Many an old stone
wall marking this early grant is still to be seen in the woods. Could
anything but the indomitable spirit of those English settlers and the
strong feeling for land ownership have built walls of carted stone about
enclosures a mile long and twenty-five feet wide?

Having effected a division of land in Cohasset, families soon began to
settle away from the mother town of Hingham, and after a prolonged
period of government at arm's length, with all its attendant
discomforts, the long, bitter struggle resolved itself into Cohasset's
final separation from Hingham, and its development from a precinct into
an independent township.

While the marshes to the north were the cause of Cohasset being first
visited, settled, and made into a township, yet the marshes to the south
hold an even more vital historical interest. These southern marshes,
bordering Bound Brook and stretching away to Bassing Beach, were visited
by haymakers as were those to the north. But these haymakers did not
come from the same township, nor were they under the same local
government. The obscure little stream which to-day lies between Scituate
Harbor and Cohasset marks the line of two conflicting grants--the
Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In the early days of New England royal grants from the throne or patents
from colonial councils in London were deemed necessary