The four-acre Ragged Island sits with Sarah and Langlee Island in Hingham Harbor.
Like many other islands in the Harbor, Indigenous communities likely accessed the islands seasonally for thousands of years prior to European Colonization.
First purchased in 1686 along with Langlee and Sarah Islands, the owner John Langlee chose to live on Ragged Island with his family. Langlee ran both a tavern and a boatyard in Hingham. Langlee’s daughter, Sarah Derby, often called “Ragged Sarah Langlee," is said to be the inspiration for the names of the three islands her family owned. Derby later founded the Derby School (academy), which is considered to be the oldest Coeducational school in New England and one of the oldest in the country.1
It is suspected that in the early 1870s a resort called “Melville Garden" operated on the island and offered excursions to nearby areas. By 1880, a restaurant and observatory operated on the island. Sketches from the 1880s, depict a large pavilion, a beautiful pier, and a rustic gazebo on the island. Sources suggest, a footbridge connected these amenities to a lavish resort at Downer’s Landing on the island.2
An account from the 1890s describes the island as:
“a very picturesque mass of rock, and the scarlet and yellow of the sumacs, and other wild shrubs, form a fiery contrast to the deep olive green of the savins here and there among the ledges...very interesting from an artistic point of view."3
All auxiliary structures are no longer present on the islands. Today, the island is home to a mix of cultivated and natural plants, likely due to the resort.4 Ragged Island is owned and managed by the town of Hingham.
Footnotes
1.Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, Cultural Landscape Report: Boston Harbor Islands National & State Park, 201-203.
2.Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, Cultural Landscape Report: Boston Harbor Islands National & State Park,, 187-192, 200.
3.Thomas T. Bouve, The History of the Town of Hingham Volume 1, (Hingham, MA: Town of Hingham, 1893), 177-178.
4. Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, Cultural Landscape Report: Boston Harbor Islands National & State Park,, 187-192.
Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service