He was born October 30, 1789, in Bennington, Vermont, one of thirteen children of his mother, Lydia, and father, Calvin Bingham.

Soon after, the Hawaiian government banned prostitution and drunkenness, which resulted in the shipping industry and the foreign community resenting Bingham's influence.

The building, constructed between 1836 and 1842 in the New England style typical of the Hawaiian missionaries, is one of the oldest standing Christian places of worship in Hawaiʻi.

Bingham used his influence with Queen Kaʻahumanu to instigate a strongly anti-Catholic policy in Hawaii, considerably impeding the work of the French Catholic missionary Alexis Bachelot (1796-1837) and resulting in decades of persecution of those Hawaiians who converted to Catholicism.

[1] Bingham was the leader of a group of missionaries that included Asa Thurston and Artemas Bishop and they translated the Christian Bible into the Hawaiian language.

His grandson Hiram Bingham III was an explorer who brought Machu Picchu to the attention of the west and became a US Senator and Governor of Connecticut.

His great-grandson Hiram Bingham IV was the US Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II and rescued Jews from the Holocaust.

In World War II, the United States liberty ship SS Hiram Bingham was named in his honor.