Solomon Whiting
5 Dec 1724 – 15 Oct 1813 · Blacksmith
A Hingham blacksmith who lived eighty-eight years, through the whole of the Revolution. The town's muster rolls name a "Solomon Whiton", but cannot tell him apart from his son of the same name.
The stone is still there. View the burial record ↗
Solomon Whiting was born in Hingham on the 5th of December, 1724, and died there on the 15th of October, 1813, in his eighty-ninth year. The 1893 History of Hingham files him under the spelling Whiton, the family wrote the name both ways, as the son of Solomon Whiton, a blacksmith, and Jael Dunbar. He took up his father’s trade: a blacksmith on or near South Pleasant Street, his shop standing on the Main Street lot in South Hingham where, a century later, the house of Charles W. Cushing would stand.
He married Mary Campbell in 1746, and they raised at least five children, Asa, Solomon, Joseph, Peleg, and Jael. Joseph went to Bridgewater; Peleg, the genealogy notes, served in an artillery company in the Revolution.
Whether Solomon himself shouldered a musket is harder to say than the flowers left at his stone suggest. The Massachusetts rolls carry a Solomon Whiton of Hingham at the Lexington alarm of April 1775, in Capt. Enoch Whiton’s company, Col. Benjamin Lincoln’s regiment, and at later coast-guard turnouts at Hull. But there were two Solomon Whitons in the town at once, father and son, and the rolls do not tell them apart: the son was twenty-four in 1775, the elder past fifty. We record the service as the record gives it, and let the doubt stand rather than award him a war he may not have fought.
His is the oldest Whiton stone we can point to in this ground, and a good place to begin a walk, though not, as it turns out, the grandfather of the Whitings the rest of it follows. They descend from another son of the immigrant James Whiton. The name is shared; the near kinship is not. That, too, is the sort of thing the records are for: to keep us from drawing a family tree the stones never grew.