Walk along Elm St. & Emerald St.

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Overview

Walk along Elm and Emerald Streets where the many mid-late 19th century homes still create a charming street vista. Irish immigrant men and women could walk to work at the nearby rope walk on Hersey Street or the woolen factory located between 70 and 74 Elm Street from 1872 to 1888. Some traveled out of the west Hingham neighborhood to work in the tassel factory just behind St. Paul’s church, to the iron foundry near the waterfront or to a tool works in south Hingham. Others were shoemakers.

Elm Street immigrant families: Among the Irish immigrant families listed on Elm Street in the 1880 census were James and Margaret Noonan, , Widow Mary McGee and two sons (one married with children), William O’Brien and family, the widow Margaret Stanton and family, and John and Mary Burns with 6 children born here.

The Burns descendants will later donate to Hingham’s Conservation Commission a large tract of woodland in the neighborhood. Now known as Burns Memorial Park, the woodland is accessible from Hersey Street.

Emerald Street immigrant families: Emerald Street was almost entirely occupied by Irish immigrant families at the time of the 1880 census. Family names included Burns, Donahue, Moore, O’Keefe, O’Reilly and Pyne.

Stop in front of the Pyne-Keohane Funeral Home at 21 Emerald Street. John Pyne, a laborer, was born in County Cork in 1828 and arrived in the U.S. in 1850. John married Mary McCarthy. They lived at 21 Emerald Street (from at least 1878.) One of their sons, John Walter Pyne, born in Hingham in 1866, lived with his wife Mary Daly, and his brother James at 17 Emerald Street (now a B&B). John W. Pyne became an undertaker. The undertaking business begun by John Walter Pyne, since sold by the family, is now the Pyne Keohane Funeral Home, located in an expanded version of what was the family home on the late 19th century.