DIVIDING THE LAND. I 35 



may be guessed. It may have been about the course of 

 our present North Main Street ; for that was the shortest 

 distance to our Little Harbor meadows from the Turkey 

 Meadow, which meadow at that time had been used for 

 cattle several years. Who the cowboys were, and the 

 swineherds of those pioneer days, the writer has been 

 unable to find out from the Hingham records ; but it is 

 they who were the first white dwellers upon our domain. 



At the same meeting which ordered the division of 

 Cohasset marshes, February 28, 1647-48, a committee of 

 four* were chosen "to hire a herdsman to keep the dry 

 cattle at Conye Hassett," and here he was living when the 

 committee came to measure the land. 



The method of measuring these marsh lands must have 

 been more crude than our present exact surveys. The 

 irregular boundaries of the marshes, where they butt against 

 the uplands, could not be marked out without needless 

 expense, and the exact number of acres in some ragged 

 pieces had to be guessed at. 



With their measuring chain and wooden stakes these 

 unprofessional surveyors marked off first the marshes 

 about the margin of Little Harbor. Their first concern 

 was to reimburse some of the Hingham settlers, whose 

 grants of land in Nantasket had been taken from them by 

 the Massachusetts General Court for the simple reason 

 that Hingham never had any right to grant her own 

 settlers, lands belonging to the Nantasket settlement. 

 Accordingly, this First Division was made up of twenty- 

 nine lots, containing a total of forty-eight and a half acres. 



In the record of these grants there are certain bound- 

 aries indicated at the four cardinal points ; but to under- 

 stand the location from our present map would take more 

 than a day's hard study. There is no map or sketch of 

 the division to be found : probably none was ever made. 



* Anthony Eames, Nicholas Jacob, John Otis, and John Beal. (Hingham Town 

 Records.) 



