Plymouth Rock
Plymouth Rock, brings up thoughts of the first
landing that brought disenfranchised pilgrims to a new land, to
a land that they hoped would give them the freedoms that they
lacked in the Old World of Europe, and this famous rock, just an
ordinary rock, that happened to be the landing place or the
place where William Bradford and the entire complement of
Mayflower pilgrims would disembark from that equally famous
ship, the Mayflower. The year was 1620, and this group would
found the Plymouth Colony, with this simple rock, like a million
others spread up and down the eastern seaboard like so many
pebbles of the giants that lived thousands of years ago. It is
really strange that there is no mention of this iconic rock in
any of the references or books about the landing, not in Edward
Winslow's Mourt's Relation from 1620 or 1621, or even Bradford's
own journal, Of Plymouth Plantation from 1620 to 1647. The first
written reference to the rock was written 121 years later, with
the rock being memorialized on the shore of the Plymouth harbor
in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The rock's location, at the bottom
of Cole's Hill, would supposedly be passed from generation to
generation for the first century, but, plans were being made to
construct a wharf at the pilgrim's landing site in 1741, and one
of the elders of the church, named Thomas Faunce, who was 94,
and the town record keeper for the majority of his life, was the
one that identified the exact rock that his father had said was
the first solid land that the pilgrims put foot on when they
first landed. It should be noted that according to history, or
historical evidence, that the pilgrims first landed near the
site of present Provincetown, which is the last settlement on
Cape Cod, in November of 1620 and moved on to Plymouth. The rock
was some 650 feet from where it has been accepted that the first
settlement would be constructed. In 1774, Colonel Theophilus
Cotton and the townspeople decided that they were going to move
the rock, so it was split in two, with the bottom part left
behind the wharf and the top piece relocated to the town meeting
hall. In 1834, it would be moved to Pilgrim Hall, but in 1859,
the society would start building a Victorian canopy located
right above the bottom half of the rock, and it would be moved
in 1880, with the original date of 1620 carved into it.
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