East Wareham, Massachusetts

Plimouth Plantation and Mayflower II

Wampanoag Homesite

The first outdoor living history exhibit we encountered on our visit is the Wampanoag Homesite, located on the banks of the Eel River. Here we discovered how the 17^th-century Wampanoag would have lived along the coast during the growing season; planting their crops, fishing and hunting, gathering wild herbs and berries for food, and reeds for making mats and baskets. We saw different kinds of homes including a mat-covered wetu, the Wampanoag word for house, and a bark-covered long house or nush wetu, meaning a house with three fire pits inside. Food is cooked over an open fire using only the ingredients that were available in the 1600s. At the riverside we saw men making a mishoon - the Wampanoag word for boat - using fire as a tool to hollow out a tree.

Unlike the people we meet in the 17^th-Century English Village, the staff in the Wampanoag Homesite are not role players. They are all Native People  - either Wampanoag or from other Native Nations - and they will be dressed in historically accurate clothing, mostly made of deerskin. They speak from a modern perspective about Wampanoag history and culture. 

 

17th-Century English Village

Welcome to the year 1627

The 17^th-Century English Village is a re-creation of the small farming and maritime community built by the Pilgrims along the shore of Plymouth Harbor. In the Village, the year is 1627, just seven years after the arrival of Mayflower. The Museum selected this year for re-creation because it is well documented in the historical sources and shows the plantation (a word that was used interchangeably with the word “colony” in the 1600s) just before the colonists began to disperse beyond the walled town and into other parts of what would become southeastern Massachusetts.

The English Village brings colonial Plymouth vividly to life. Here, we found modest timber-framed houses furnished with reproductions of the types of objects that the Pilgrims owned, aromatic kitchen gardens, and heritage breeds livestock. Engaging townspeople were eager to tell us about their new lives in Plymouth Colony.

The people we met are costumed role players portraying actual residents of Plymouth Colony. They have adopted the names, viewpoints and life histories of the people who lived and worked in the Colony in 1627. Each has a unique story to tell. 

The Craft  Center

At the Craft Center, we saw some of the accomplished artisans who make Plimoth Plantation feel like the 17^th century. Using the tools, materials and craft techniques of the 1600s, our modern-day craftspeople create many of the objects you see in the Wampanoag Homesite and the 17^th-Century English Village. Native artisans make stone, wood and sinew tools, porcupine roaches or headdresses and hand-coiled clay pots. Other artisans practice historic English trades, making reproductions of the objects that early 17^th-century colonists imported from England. Plimoth Plantation’s celebrated joiners (furniture makers), potters and tailors provide the Museum’s 17^th-Century English Village with its accurate material culture.

Mayflower II

Visiting the ship Mayflower II is an extraordinary experience. The original Mayflower that sailed to Plymouth in 1620 no longer exists. Plimoth Plantation's full-scale reproduction, Mayflower II, was built in Devon, England and crossed the Atlantic in 1957. The details of the ship, from the solid oak timbers and tarred hemp rigging to the wood and horn lanterns and hand-colored maps, have been carefully re-created to give a sense of what the original 17th-century vessel was like.

Plymouth Rock

The famous Plymouth Rock is located on the waterfront in downtown Plymouth, near where Mayflower II is anchored today. However, this illustrious boulder has had many adventures. In 1774, Plymouth was animated by the spirit of the impending Revolution and it was resolved, as James Thatcher relates, to "consecrate the rock...on the altar of liberty"; to associate the symbol of the Forefathers and the community with the new cause and legitimize what was a contentious issue in the town. The Rock was lifted from it's bed and "...in attempting to mount it on the carriage it split asunder, without any violence.

As no one had observed a flaw, the circumstance occasioned some surprise. It is not strange that some of the patriots of the day should be disposed to indulge a little in superstition, when in favor of their good cause. The separation of the rock was construed to be ominous of a division of the British Empire."

The upper piece of the Rock was moved by teams of oxen up to the Town Square near the Town House, where a Liberty Pole had been set up. However, after the crisis was over, the Rock was neglected to some extent, as was witnessed by Edward Kendall in 1807: "The place assigned to this venerable stone, is no other than the end of a wall, in which, along with vulgar stones, it props up an embankment..." near an elm tree in the Town Square. The practice of taking pieces as souvenirs had also begun, so on July 4, 1834 (after James Thatcher's 1832 History of the Town of Plymouth had heightened interest in the town's history), the Rock was moved again.

In 1819, a number of Plymoutheans decided to form a historical society in honor of the Pilgrims, in anticipation of the approaching bicentennial of the arrival at Plymouth. The Pilgrim Society was incorporated the following year "for the purpose of procuring in the town of Plymouth a suitable lot or piece of ground for the erection of a monument to perpetuate the memory of the virtues, the enterprise and unparalleled sufferings of their ancestors who first settled in that ancient town, and for the erection of a suitable building for the accommodation of the meetings of said association".

The construction of the building was soon begun, and in 1824 Pilgrim Hall was opened both for meetings and as a repository for Pilgrim relics. It was the logical place to remove the Rock to, and a decorative iron fence was erected to receive it. It was on the 1834 journey that Plymouth Rock acquired it's famous crack, by falling off of it's conveyance in front of the Court House. This was not seen as ominous, however. Even in its new cage, the Rock was chipped at until the Town put a stop to the practice, as Thoreau noted in his diary in 1851.

The laying of the cornerstones of a new Plymouth Rock canopy and Forefathers' Monument occurred on August 2, 1859. Both were designed by Hammett Billings of Boston. "The committee decided on the following plan for the celebration: The laying of the cornerstone of the canopy by the Masonic order; a procession; the laying of the cornerstone of the National Monument with Masonic ceremonies; a dinner provided by J.B.Smith of Boston in a tent, capable of holding twenty-five hundred persons,...fireworks and a ball in the evening in Davis Hall." The parade included over thirty groups of militia units, bands, Masonic and Templar lodges, historical societies, fire departments, and "...six groups on flats representing the Landing, Indians, advance of civilization, the thirty-three states, different nations, and the marine interests of Plymouth."

The canopy was finished in 1867, and contained not only the lower portion of the Rock, but a number of bones found on Cole's Hill when a sewer was being laid in 1854. These were identified by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as the remains of white persons, and presumed to be those Pilgrims who had died the First Winter. They were buried, according to a tradition preserved by Elder Faunce, in secret near the first Common house on Leyden Street.

After the completion of the canopy, the Pilgrim Society purchased a number of houses (characterized by a reporter as "...unsightly buildings that encumber this space...") on Cole's Hill overlooking the Rock, which were torn down to provide a suitable backdrop to the structure.
In order to get the lower portion of the Rock to fit in its new home, it was necessary to cut off several pieces, which were apparently used as souvenirs and to supply the demand for "a piece of the rock" elsewhere.

The upper half was then removed to a fenced enclosure in front of Pilgrim Hall on July 4, 1834, and reunited to its other part on September 27, 1880. The upper half was put under the canopy and "1620," (which had been previously painted on) was carved into it.

The Rock was moved once when the Billings canopy was demolished before the 1920-21 Tercentennary celebration. Both sections of the Rock were lifted from their bed and removed to make way for construction of a new memorial structure. The strain on the boulder caused it to break apart once again, and further pieces had to be removed in order to reunite the sections before it was lowered to the new water level position it remains at today. The present canopy, designed by McKim, Mead and White and built by Roy B. Beattie of Fall River, was donated by the National Society of Colonial Dames in 1921.

James W. Baker
Plimoth Plantation