User:Generalissima/Plymouth Rock

A rewrite draft of the page available at Plymouth Rock. Comments in italics because i'm lazy.

History

Settlement of Plymouth

In 1614, English explorer John Smith mapped Plymouth Harbor, initially naming the area "Accomack". He was later convinced by Charles, Prince of Wales to rename the site after the town of Plymouth.

The Mayflower made two landings near Corn Hill, on the Cape Cod peninsula. After an expedition party explored the region, the Pilgrims decided against settling due to the lack of a suitable harbor. Shipmate Robert Coppin, who had previously explored the area alongside Smith, advocated for settling at Plymouth Harbor, stating that it had a deep natural harbor, fresh water, and open land suitable for agriculture. A party originally landed at Clark's Island, before returning aboard and traveling three miles to the northwest. On December 11, 1620, another landing party surveyed the area and found it appropriate for settlement. The Mayflower reached the harbor several days later. A second landing party surveyed the area on December 18, with the rest of the passengers disembarking to construct rudimentary housing on December 24. Find better sourcing here.

Association with the Rock

A "great rock" in the harbor was first noted on a 1715 survey map of Plymouth. According to local oral history, plans to construct a wharf in the harbor were laid in 1741. Anchored by stone and masonry, the wharf would incidentally bury the boulder. Thomas Faunce, a 94-year-old church elder, expressed "a strong desire to take a last farewell of the cherished object" and was carried to the beach in a chair to testify that the rock was the initial landing site of the town's settlers. Faunce's grandfather arrived in Plymouth in 1623, and likely relayed the story to him; additionally, Faunce himself was old enough to have personally met several Mayflower passengers. Development of the wharf continued despite Faunce's testimony, but the rock was too large to be removed or destroyed, and was instead left to protrude through the head of the wharf, serving as a nuisance to carts; it was raised above the surface of the dock to such a degree that oxen could be harnessed to it. Other oral histories describe Faunce as regularly taking his children and grandchildren to the rock on the anniversary of the landing, which would later be named Forefathers' Day.

Deacon Ephraim Spooner, six years old in 1741, relayed the story of Faunce to the Old Colony Club soon after its founding in 1769, where it was first put into written record; the story was corroborated by other older residents of Plymouth, including Joanna White, who had been close with Faunce's family. Forefathers' Day celebrations began in earnest on December 22, 1769, likely in preparation for the 150th anniversary of the event the following year. The date continued to gain relevance over time, and became a popular annual celebration by the beginning of the 1800s.

In early 1774, the Patriot Theopolius Cotton organized a large crowd and attempted to transport the rock to the town square for a liberty celebration. After a team of 30 yoke of oxen raised the rock from the wharf, the rock split in two. Half of the boulder was kept at its previous location within the wharf, while the upper portion was hauled to the town square, accompanying liberty pole celebrations. The next year, following the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Captain Benjamin Coit forced British prisoners of war to disembark onto the seaside half of the rock.

Historical assessment

1869 depiction of half of Plymouth Rock, showing the 1620 carving

William Bradford's 1651 Of Plymouth Plantation makes no mention of a rock, stating simply that the Pilgrims "marched into the land". A rock along the shore would have likely been avoided by the crew of the Mayflower as a hazard. It likely stood above high-tide on an otherwise flat shoreline, and set a few hundred yards from the sheltered mouth of Town Brook, a small creek which later saw the settlement's first pier.

Cultural legacy

In literature

One of the earliest examples of the rock in popular literature is an ode to the rock written by Robert Treat Paine in 1801. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1858 poem The Courtship of Miles Standish featured the rock and widely contributed to the myths surrounding it.

Physical description

One third of Plymouth Rock currently lies above ground, with the whole rock weighing about 10 tons.

Geology

Plymouth Rock is a dedham granite boulder, currently weighing about 10 tons. A glacial erratic, the rock formed some distance to the northwest, possibly as far as Boston or Concord.

McPhee opens his essay by citing multiple other, mostly early 20th century theories of the erratic's original source; Laurentian terranes north of the St. Lawrence, (Loring, 1920), Cape Ann (Carnegie, 1923), Cohasset (Shimer, 1951), or Plymouth Bay itself (thereby not making it much of an erratic, Mather, 1952). However, the rest of the essay mentions E-An Zen, who gives the location as "somewhere between Boston and Plymouth". Perhaps this will have to have a bit of a geohistoriography to account for changing interpretations of the rock over time, and McPhee's source certainly counts as analysis of this history.

Fragments

Since a lot of these fragments are from known larger fragments or specific instances where portions of the rock crumbled, this is going to work better as prose going through the timeline of where notable pieces were taken from the rock, rather than a separate list by location held like my original intentions.

A 40-pound piece of the rock is held at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

A small fragment is held at Union Chapel in Islington, London, gifted to the church's minister during an 1883 lecture tour in the United States.

References

Bibliography

• Arner, Robert D. (1983). "Plymouth Rock Revisited: The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers". Journal of American Culture. 6 (4): 25–35. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.1983.0604_25.x.
• Bush, Sargent (2000). "America's Origin Myth: Remembering Plymouth Rock". American Literary History. 12 (4): 745–756. JSTOR 490199.
• Confronti, Joseph A. (2001). Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807826256.
• Hebel, Udo J. (2001). "Historical Bonding with an Expiring Heritage: Revisiting the Plymouth Tercentenary Festivities of 1920/21". Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century. New York: Berghahn Books. pp. 257–297. ISBN 9781782389897. JSTOR j.ctt1btbxf7.
• McPhee, John (2001). "Travels of the Rock". The Princeton Anthology of Writing: Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton University. Princeton University Press. pp. 351–368. ISBN 9780691236865. JSTOR j.ctv1t1kg4j.
• Sargent, Mark L. (1988). "Plymouth Rock and the Great Awakening". Journal of American Studies. 22 (2): 249–255. JSTOR 27555007.
• Seelye, John (1998). Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807867044.
• Sollors, Werner (1994). "National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: "Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island"; or, Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of America". In Fabre, Geneviève; O'Meally, Robert (eds.). History and Memory in African-American Culture. Oxford University Press. pp. 92–122.
• Russell, Francis (1962). "The Pilgrims and The Rock". American Heritage. 13 (6): 48–55. ISSN 0002-8738.

Older sources

• Thacher, James (1832). History of the Town of Plymouth from its First Settlement in 1620 to the Year 1832. Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon. OCLC 317695485.

Useful Sources:

• Gambino, Megan, The True Story Behind Plymouth Rock, Smithsonian Magazine, November 22, 2011 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-true-story-behind-plymouth-rock-639690/
• Plymouth Rock Still a Symbol, New York Times, 24 Nov 1985, p. 49
• Plymouth Rock Is Vandalized, New York Times, 14 Aug 1991, p. A.10
• Pieces of Plymouth Rock for sale, Cape Cod Times, 26 Nov, 2005. https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2005/11/26/pieces-plymouth-rock-for-sale/50908761007/
• https://insider.si.edu/2011/11/plymouth-rock-piece-1620/
• Proposed Plymouth Rock National Memorial, National Park Service, Clemson University Libraries, 1969, https://archive.org/details/proposedplymouth00nati
• Doss, Erika. “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan: Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts.” Winterthur Portfolio 46, no. 4 (2012): 237–70. https://doi.org/10.1086/669736. (incidentally useful)
• Browne, Stephen H. "Reading public memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock oration." Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 57, no. 4 (1993): 464-477.
• Calvo, Clara. "Shakespeare's church and the pilgrim fathers: commemorating Plymouth Rock in Stratford." Critical Survey 24, no. 2 (2012): 54-70.
• Pole, Nelson. "Why Plymouth Rock is Not the Rock of Ages." Philosophy in Context 5 (1976): 42-49.
• Levinson, Martin H. "Examining ten commonly accepted verbal maps of American history." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 66, no. 4 (2009): 364-370.