This historic community is about ten miles southeast of Boston, MA. Note the old incandescent gooseneck street light and rather primitive electric distribution pole. Originally the customer and electric lighting service in Hingham was provided by the privately-owned Weymouth Light and Power Company who had a generation facility in the neighboring town. In 1894 Hingham citizens opted and unanimously voted for a lighting service provider of their own. At that time Hingham had about 58 electric customers (now about 11,000). Since then, like all other public power systems in the United States (currently over 2,000 of them ;-) Hingham ratepayers have enjoyed lower rates than neighboring investor owned electric utilities, person-to-person customer service and prompt power restoration during outages.