Old Ship Church

Old Ship Church (Old Ship Meetinghouse) Hingham, Massachusetts
Old Ship Church
Location	Main Street Hingham, Massachusetts
Built	1681
NRHP reference No.	6600077
Added to NRHP	November 15, 1966

The Old Ship Church (also known as the Old Ship Meetinghouse) was built in 1681 in Hingham, Massachusetts. It is the oldest church in continuous ecclesiastical use in the United States, the only remaining 17th century Puritan meetinghouse in New England, and the only surviving example in America of the English Gothic style of the 17th century. The first minister of Old Ship was the Rev. Peter Hobart, who had attended the heavily Puritan Cambridge University. Natives of Hingham in East Anglia, Peter Hobart, his father Edmund and brother Lieut. Joshua Hobart were among Hingham's most prominent early settlers. Deacon John Leavitt, whose son John married Rev. Hobart's daughter, was the deacon when Old Ship was constructed and argued forcefully for the construction of a new meetinghouse.

The program celebrating the 275th anniversary of the raising of the Old Ship Church in July 1956 described the raising of the meetinghouse:

"It was a hot day, the 26th of July 1691, when the townspeople gathered on the wooden knoll bordering on Bachelor's Row (now Main Street), Hingham, Mass, to take part in what the Selectmen's record described as the 'raising of the frame of the new Meeting House.' It was a community undertaking and every freeman in the town had been assessed for the cost of the structure according to his worth, in amounts ranging from one pound to fifteen pounds. There were all there, regardless of the heat, including Deacon John Leavitt, well over seventy years old, who had led the successful fight to have the new Meeting House erected approximately on the site of the old."

The current minister is Kenneth Read-Brown, a direct descendant of Rev. Peter Hobart. The congregation is Unitarian Universalist and is a proud Welcoming Congregation.

External links

• Official website
• Hingham, The New York Times
• National Park Service Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
• National Register listings for Plymouth County
• Old Ship Historic Marker
• Reverend Peter Hobart Historic Marker