On September 28, 1666, the people of Hull made an agreement with a man named Nathan Parmele.
The town would pay him forty shillings a year “to beat the Drum Sabbath Days for the Calling of the People together,” and also at Town Meetings and Training Days. There were conditions. Parmele had to be chosen by the local militia company as its drummer, and he was responsible for maintaining the drum at his own expense.
And then, almost as quickly as he appears, Nathan Parmele disappears.
I have been trying to find him. I have searched genealogies and histories, followed variations of his surname, and looked for some other trace of the man who was chosen for this task. So far, I have found almost nothing. For one brief moment on September 28, 1666, he steps out of the town records with a drum in his hands. Then the record falls silent.
Perhaps there is something fitting about that, because the real story is not the drummer. It is the sound.
In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, before bells became common, drums were part of the communications system of a town. Cambridge used one to summon people to meeting as early as the 1630s. Boston employed town drummers who served both civic and military purposes. Drums called people to worship, announced town meetings, and summoned militia companies.
Hull was participating in a practice its neighbors would have understood.
The drum said: Come together.
We can still stand in something close to the landscape where that sound was heard. Hull’s principal seventeenth-century settlement was here in the old Village, in the valley between the hills. Main and Spring Streets, the roads that surround the old Town Green, appear to have their origins in the middle of the seventeenth century. The shoreline has changed, buildings have come and gone, and the town has grown far beyond anything Nathan Parmele could have imagined, but the bones of the old landscape remain.
That matters to me because I live here.
My house, the old Loring House, dates to about this same period. The Town Common is only steps from my front door. When I walk through this neighborhood, I am walking through the landscape into which that drum once sounded.
Hull was a small maritime settlement then, built principally around fishing, with farming and grazing playing supporting roles. There were scattered households farther along the peninsula, but the Village was the center of communal life.
And the same drum could summon Hull for very different reasons.
On the Sabbath, the drum called Hull to worship.
At Town Meeting, the drum called Hull to govern itself.
On Training Day, the drum called the militia company to muster.
The instrument did not change. The community did.
That may be what fascinates me most about the September 28 entry. We tend to divide life into categories that would have made considerably less sense to the people living here in 1666. Church belongs over here. Government belongs over there. Military affairs belong somewhere else entirely. In Hull, the same drum summoned all three because all three were woven into the life of the town.
The drumming itself was not simply noise. Seventeenth-century military drummers learned a vocabulary of recognizable signals. English military manuals from Parmele’s generation describe distinct beats for gathering, marching, charging, retreating, sounding an alarm, and other commands. A drummer needed training. In Boston, the town paid its drummer Arthur Perry to teach two younger men the “skill and use of the drum” necessary for military service.
That makes one phrase in Hull’s agreement particularly important. The town would employ Parmele only if he were chosen by “the Company” to be its drummer. Hull was not simply looking for someone who could make a loud noise on Sunday morning. A company drummer belonged to a trained tradition of military communication.
One contemporary military manual described a beat called the Gathering, whose purpose was to bring a company together at an appointed place.
We do not know whether Nathan Parmele played that particular beat on a Sabbath morning in Hull. The town record does not tell us. We do not know precisely where he stood, how often he beat the drum, or what rhythm he used when calling people to worship rather than military drill.
Nearly 360 years have carried those sounds away.
But we know what Hull asked the drum to do.
Call the people together.
Town Meeting was serious business. A few years after the agreement with Parmele, Hull voted that anyone who had received sufficient warning and completely missed a Town Meeting could be fined twelve pence. Arrive late without good reason and the fine was six pence. Remarkably, seven people assembled at the appointed time were enough to constitute a lawful Town Meeting.
Training Day carried its own seriousness. Within a decade of Parmele’s agreement, King Philip’s War had engulfed New England. In March 1676, Hull ordered two common fortifications constructed as places of defense and required male inhabitants fifteen years old and older to contribute proportionally to the work.
The military obligation represented by Training Day was not theoretical.
Yet on another day, the drum called people toward worship.
That is the image I keep returning to.
Somewhere in this little settlement around the old Green, a drum begins to sound. Across a landscape whose outlines are still faintly recognizable, people hear it. Perhaps doors open. Perhaps someone pauses over the work of the morning. Perhaps someone farther down the road recognizes the summons and begins walking toward the center of town.
We cannot recover that morning in detail. But we know the purpose of the sound.
Hull was being called together.
There is plenty about seventeenth-century Massachusetts that should not be romanticized. The community summoned by that drum was not equally open to everyone. Political participation was restricted, religious conformity carried expectations we would rightly reject today, and Indigenous people had inhabited and used this landscape long before English settlers began calling it Hull.
But I think September 28 is still worth remembering.
Not because we should recreate the world Nathan Parmele inhabited, but because communities still need ways of calling themselves together.
We have become extraordinarily good at communicating without gathering. A message appears on a screen. A notification sounds. Information reaches us individually and instantly, wherever we happen to be. We can know almost everything happening around us without ever having to stand beside one another.
Parmele’s drum did something different.
It did not merely distribute information. It summoned people into a common place—for worship, for deliberation, for responsibility, for the work that could only be done together.
Perhaps that is why this obscure entry in an old town record has stayed with me. Nathan Parmele remains a mystery. I do not know where he came from or where he went. I do not know how long he served as Hull’s drummer—or, because the town’s agreement was conditional upon the militia company choosing him, whether he ever actually took up the position at all.
But on September 28, 1666, the Town of Hull decided that when the community needed to gather, someone should beat the drum.
The drummer has disappeared. The drum has fallen silent. The old Green remains.
And perhaps, every now and then, we still need to hear its invitation:
Come together.
Image: Jacques Callot, L’Exercice du Tambour (Drill with Drums), 1635, from Les Exercices Militaires. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain. The image depicts contemporary European military drummers practicing their craft; it is illustrative of seventeenth-century military drumming and is not a depiction of Nathan Parmele or Hull.
