Thomas Hinckley
governor of the Plymouth Colony
Thomas Hinckley (bapt. March 19, 1618 – April 25, 1706) was the last governor of the Plymouth Colony. Born in England, he arrived in New England as a teenager, and was a leading settler of what is now Barnstable, Massachusetts. He served in a variety of political and military offices before becoming governor of the colony in 1680, a post he held (excluding the interregnum of the Dominion of New England, 1686–1689) until the colony was folded into the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692. A monument, created in 1829 at the Lothrop Hill cemetery in Barnstable, attests to his "piety, usefulness and agency in the public transactions of his time."
Life
Thomas Hinckley was born in Tenterden, Kent, England in 1618. His parents, Samuel and Sarah (Soole) Hinckley, were followers of the Nonconformist minister John Lothropp, in whose church at nearby Hawkhurst Thomas was baptized on March 19, 1618. In 1634 the Hinckleys and Lothropp migrated to New England, although when Thomas came over is uncertain, because he did not travel with his parents. They settled in the Plymouth Colony community of Scituate. In 1637 he was made a freeman of the colony, and in 1639 the Hinckleys followed Lothropp to become early settlers of Barnstable, apparently over doctrinal differences in the Scituate church.
Hinckley's public service began in 1643, when he joined the local militia company.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7790697. VIAF identifies the subject as 58078192. The Library of Congress control number is n85356601. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1618, 1706, 1680 and 1686.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Hinckley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.