An apocryphal story used to be told by the late Professor Howard Mumford
Jones of an elderly African American janitor from the University of Texas
who made a sightseeing bus tour of the United States. When he reached
Plymouth, he sent back a postcard of Plymouth Rock on which he had written:
"Here is where our forefathers landed."
In a very real way, the old man was absolutely correct. As was said by
the renowned historian Samuel Eliot Morison:
"...the Pilgrims in a sense have become the spiritual ancestors of all
Americans, whatever their stock, race or creed. Bradford foretold it himself
in these words: 'Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been
produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all
things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light
here kindled hath shown unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation...'
"
Very few things in American history have had the power to inspire like
our "first national landmark", Plymouth Rock. But while millions flock to it
every year, they're visiting nothing more than a symbol, albeit a very
powerful one. But what of the history of that huge piece of granite by
itself? Does it "live up to its press", so to speak? Let's take a look.
Governor William Bradford gives a plain account of the landing of the
Pilgrims on December 11, allegedly on Plymouth Rock: "On Munday they sounded
ye harbor and found it fitt for shipping; and marched into ye land, & found
diverse cornfields, & little running brooks, a place fitt for situation. At
least it was ye best they could find, and ye season, & their presente
necessitie, made them glad to accepte of it. So they returned to their
shippe again with this news to ye rest of their people, which did much
comforte their harts."
Nothing about landing on a rock.
The first time Plymouth Rock's existence is mentioned in the historical
record is in 1715, when it is described in the town boundary records as "a
great rock."
In 1769, seven socially prominent young men of Plymouth, fed up with
"the many disadvantages and inconveniences that arise from intermixing with
the company at the taverns in this town," organized the Old Colony Club,
and, to legitimatize their undertaking, voted to celebrate "the landing of
our worthy ancestors." They then decided to observe December 22, the New
Style anniversary of the original landing, as a new holiday called
Forefathers' Day (The date was corrected to December 21 in 1849 changed back
in 1862, was whipsawed back and forth several more times, and is now
celebrated on the twenty-first.). The club never consisted of more than
thirteen members, and in that time of gathering crisis (the Boston Massacre
occurred in March, 1770, three months after the club's first meeting) the
majority were to take the Tory side.
The first Forefathers' Day dinner of the Old Colony Club was held at
Loyalist Thomas Southworth Howland's tavern on Cole's Hill and encompassed
nine copious courses. The day began with a salvo of cannon in front of the
club rooms, followed by the raising of "an elegant silk flag with the
inscription 'Old Colony 1620'. " It closed with the singing of John
Dickinson's popular ode "In Freedom We're Born" by the boys of the grammar
school, an evening of toasts, and a final cannon salvo.
Some time after the Forefathers' Day celebration had become the talk of
Plymouth high society, Deacon Ephraim Spooner, churchman and prosperous
hardware merchant, confided to several members of the Old Colony Club the
story of the ancestral landing on Plymouth Rock. Deacon Spooner had heard it
in 1741 from the lips of ninety-five-year-old Thomas Faunce, an Elder of the
First Church. Faunce in turn had been told about it by his father, John
Faunce, who came over in the ship Ann in 1623 and who had presumably heard
it first hand. Although Spooner was only six years old at the time Faunce
spoke, he had never forgotten (he said) the words and appearance of the
venerable elder.
According to Deacon Spooner, plans had been made in 1741 to build a
wharf on the waterfront that would cover a large rock at the base of Cole's
Hill. When Elder Faunce heard of this, he had himself carried in a chair
three miles to the spot. There, before a large crowd of people, including
the six-year-old Ephraim Spooner, he pointed out the threatened rock as the
very one that his father had assured him had received the footsteps of the
Pilgrims as they landed. The old man "bedewed it with his tears and bid to
it an everlasting adieu." Apparently this dramatic show of emotion had less
effect on the builders than it did on Ephraim, for they built their wharf
anyway, leaving only a small hump of the rock above ground. No one thought
more about that encumbering fragment, except for a few cursing teamsters as
their carts bounced over it, until the deacon made his revelation a
generation later.
As Revolution against the mother country became inevitable, members of
the Old Colony Club found themselves so divided politically that they
disbanded. But the observance of Forefathers' Day continued, and the legend
of Plymouth Rock spread.
Edward Winslow marked the rock's site on a British survey map of
Plymouth made in 1774. Later that year, with the sides now drawn in the
coming struggle, the Sons of Liberty (called by Winslow the "Sons of
Licentiousness") were the first to appropriate the rock's burgeoning
symbolism. Militia Colonel Theophilus Cotton and a band of Liberty Boys
appeared on the wharf on December 22 with a carriage and thirty yoke of
oxen, prepared to take the rock away. They dug down and managed to elevate
it from its bed with large screws, but as they attempted to move it onto the
carriage it split in two. Some of the more patriotic present saw the split
as symbolic of the division between England and the colonies - or so they
said afterward. Colonel Cotton and his boys then let the bottom section drop
back into its bed, where it remained a few inches above the earth. The top
segment, weighing four or five tons, was carted to the Town Square and
placed ceremoniously beside a large elm used to support the newly erected
Liberty Pole which flew their "Liberty or Death" flag.
Forefathers' Day was celebrated each year during the war, but then fell
out of use and was not observed again until 1793. John Davis, a Plymouth
lawyer, composed an ode for that occasion in which the Rock was for the
first time celebrated in verse; the term "Pilgrim" was also used that day in
a memorial sermon preached by the Reverend Chandler Robbins. Not for another
fifty years would the Forefathers become generally known as Pilgrims,
although the term did begin to show up often in the poems and songs written
for successive anniversaries.
The name derives from a casual remark of Bradford's in his history.
Expressing the regret of the colonists at leaving the city of Leyden in
Holland, he wrote: "But they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on
those things but lift up their eyes to ye heavens, their dearest cuntrie."
Even though Bradford's manuscript was lost in the Revolution (it turned up
in 1844 in the library of the Lord Bishop of London and was not returned to
Boston until 1897), extracts from it had been copied down, and this
unearthed sentence was undoubtedly the impulse that revived the term, just
as it later encouraged Victorian artists to depict the Pilgrims with eyes
lifteded heavenward.
The legend of the Rock then spread throughout New England. Timothy
Dwight, President of Yale, visited Plymouth in 1800, announcing with more
emotion than accuracy: "No New Englander who is willing to indulge his
native feelings, can stand upon the rock where our ancestors set the first
foot after their arrival on the American shore, without experiencing
emotions very different from those which are excited by any common object of
the same nature."
Two years later the Forefathers' Day address was delivered by no less a
light than John Quincy Adams. But the most imposing celebration came in
1820. For this two hundredth anniversary, John Watson, one of the few
pre-Revolution celebrants still living near Plymouth, emerged from
self-imposed obscurity (his wartime sympathies were decidedly Tory) to
organize the Pilgrim Society. A much less exclusive organization than the
Old Colony Club, the Pilgrim Society opened its membership to everyone with
ten dollars "interested in perpetuating the fame of the Forefathers." As an
additional honor for the bicentennial Forefathers' Day, a brightly uniformed
independent company, the Standish Guards, was organized. Daniel Webster,
then at the threshold of his career, appeared resplendently as the principal
speaker. Wearing knee breeches, enveloped in a silk gown whose resemblance
to a toga was not altogether accidental, and flanked by the Standish Guards,
he spoke in front of the rock fragment in the Town Square. For two hours he
held forth in ringing Ciceronian periods "full of the farina of thought and
feeling," according to a local newspaper, delving rather elaborately into
all the symbolic meaning of Plymouth Rock.
Unfortunately, as Plymouth Rock increased in fame, it began to decrease
in size under the hands of souvenir hunters. Plymouth shops were offering
pieces the size of an egg for $1.50, guaranteed to "take a very fine
polish." Alexis De Tocqueville on his travels noted fragments of the relic
in several towns. Finally, on July 4, 1834, what remained of the Rock's
upper section was taken from the Town Square and placed in front of the
Doric portico of the recently erected Pilgrim Hall. Preceded by
schoolchildren and followed by a model of the Mayflower, the Rock was
carried on a decorated cart escorted by the Plymouth Band and the Standish
Guards. As the procession was passing the courthouse a linchpin worked out
of the cart and the Rock tumbled into the street, breaking into the two
pieces so familiar to us today in their cemented state. A year later this
portion of the Rock was enclosed by a five foot high elliptical fence, the
pickets of which were made up alternately of wrought iron harpoons and boat
hooks. The hammered granite base was studded with symbolic scallop shells,
and the numerals 1620 were painted on the Rock. Meanwhile the stump on
Hedge's Wharf continued to bear the burden of passing wheels. Sometimes,
when visitors asked to see it, a clerk would come out of Phineas Wells'
adjacent warehouse and brush it off.
In 1859 the Pilgrim Society bought the upper end of the wharf, tore down
the warehouse, and laid the cornerstone of a "monumental canopy," designed
by Hammatt Billings, over the much abused base. Its construction was
interrupted by the Civil War and finally completed in 1867. Soon after its
erection the intrepidity of souvenir hunters forced the addition of iron
gates.
For tourists to Plymouth it was always a little perplexing to find two
Plymouth Rocks, each in a separate enclosure. To end this confusion the
Pilgrim Society in 1880 moved the upper section from its metal cage and
united it with the stump under the Billings canopy. The Rock, as many noted,
was still eight or ten feet above the high-tide mark, but at least it was
all in one place.
Also in 1880, the date, 1620, was carved into the stone to replace the
painted numerals.
During the next forty years Plymouth Rock remained secure and unaltered
under its baldachin. In 1883 the Pilgrim Society bought the rest of the
wharf, leveled the remaining warehouses, and fitted the lower wharf end as a
steamboat landing. Then, in 1920, amidst tremendous preparations for the
three hundredth anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims, the wharf was
removed, the waterfront re-landscaped, and the canopy torn down.
The Tercentenary Celebration opened on Forefathers' Day, 1920, with an
issue of commemorative U.S. stamps. At Plymouth, Governor Calvin Coolidge,
the Vice President-elect, made a short address. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
was the principal speaker. The following week two steam shovels dug around
the Rock, which was then wrapped in lengths of chain and hoisted out of its
bed. The three sections promptly came apart. They were set aside while the
site was excavated down to sea level. A month later the base was replaced
some ten feet lower, and the more familiar upper segment cemented to it.
With Plymouth Rock at last located where it could be lapped twice a day by
the high tide a white granite Grecian temple, designed by McKim, Mead and
White, was raised over it.
A tercentenary pageant, the Pilgrim Spirit, written by Harvard's
professor of drama, George Pierce Baker, was performed the next summer. At
the climax of this cerebration the presidential yacht Mayflower, with
President Harding aboard, steamed into Plymouth Harbor accompanied by four
battleships and six destroyers. The Grecian temple was finally dedicated the
following day on a wild day of rain and wind.
After three centuries the legend of Plymouth Rock has become so fixed in
the American consciousness that the Rock itself takes on the magical aura of
a Blarney Stone or a Stone of Scoon. When some prankster in 1937 daubed the
Rock with red paint, the news of this national desecration brought an outcry
across the entire country. At once Harvard University (symbolic color -
crimson) and the Communist Party of Massachusetts (symbolic color - red)
disavowed any connection with the horrid deed.
Yet, if the landing on Plymouth Rock is indeed a myth, it is no more a
myth than that the Stone of Scoon once served as Jacob's pillow and no more
a myth than the Blarney Stone's gift of eloquence. It is the meaning behind
the myth that is important, not the myth itself. And that meaning in our
case is that people who came, are coming and will come to America to seek a
better life are one and all the sons and daughters of the Pilgrims of 1620.
