by Tony Horwitz
“About the year 1741,” the story went, a church elder named Faunce asked to be carried to the shore, where a wharf was soon to be built. Pointing to a large rock, he said it was the very stone that “had received the footsteps of our fathers on their first arrival.” Faunce then “bedewed it with his tears and bid to it an everlasting adieu.”
Elder Faunce was ninety-five at the time. Even if his memory was intact, he’d been born a quarter century after the Pilgrims landed. His father, from whom he’d heard the story, wasn’t a witness, either; he came to Plymouth three years after the Mayflower. And the story of Faunce’s identification of the stone was itself based on a boyhood memory, that of a deacon who recalled, many decades later, having been “present on the interesting occasion” of the old man’s teary farewell.
At the time of Faunce’s adieu, no one else much cared about the Rock, which was promptly buried beneath the new wharf. But on the eve of the American Revolution, “animated by the glorious spirit of liberty,” Plymoutheans tried to free the stone with thirty yoke of oxen. In so doing, they split it. Unable to pry loose the bottom half, they toted the top part to the town square, where it became a venerated and much vandalized symbol of liberty, with souvenir-seekers chipping off pieces to carry home.
When locals later moved the mutilated stone to safer ground, behind a fence at Pilgrim Hall, they dropped it from a cart, adding a fresh crack. Eventually, the wandering slab was reunited with its other half at the waterfront and cemented to it. The wharf was torn down and the Greek Outhouse erected, creating the venue where tourists have looked down at the much-abused Rock ever since.
“I always tell visitors it used to be bigger,” Dan Cuetera said. “Anyway, sailors don’t land ships on a rock. They’re always trying to avoid rocks.”
Dan worked as a historical interpreter aboard the replica Mayflower, which was moored near the Rock. As part of his job, he inhabited the role of one of the many “Strangers,” or non-Pilgrim passengers, who sailed on the Mayflower, seeking economic opportunity rather than religious liberty. “I am not one of these separatists from Holland,” Dan said, assuming his period voice, “though God’s grace and profit do jump together.”
Like other interpreters, Dan had taken dialect training at Plimoth Plantation, a living history park outside town. There were many accents to learn, since the original settlers came from different regions of England. Dan’s favorite was East Anglia, source of the generic pirate accent. “I swallow me r’s and har’ly p’onounce ’em a’tall.” He laughed. “That’s the fun part of the job. No one would be doing this if it wasn’t for Monty Python.”
Dan wasn’t quite so keen on the dress-up part of his job, which had also been meticulously researched. The male Pilgrim stereotype—black clothes, tall stiff-brimmed hat adorned with a buckle—was rich person’s attire, the stuff of portraits, not daily life. Plymouth’s settlers were mostly modest country folk, and when Dan played one, he wore a floppy hat, loose pants, and shapeless jacket, all the color of dead leaves. “Not a flattering look,” he said. “The breeches are baggy around the butt and the jacket would make Adonis look stoop-shouldered.”
Pilgrims’ plain ways extended to music, which Dan performed as part of a period troupe. In church, Pilgrims sang only psalms and never in perfect harmony. “A psalm is the word of God, not to be ornamented with the work of man,” Dan explained. “That is what Papists do.” So his group mostly sang English country songs, without musical accompaniment. The singers called themselves the Puritones.
While Dan enjoyed mocking the Pilgrims, he thought their dour Calvinism explained why Plymouth, rather than Jamestown, had been anointed the country’s birthplace. “The Virginia story is a lot more exciting, but as a founding myth it’s a lousy fit,” he said. “No one wants to build a national story around a man killing and eating his pregnant wife, or colonists too lazy to grow their own food. Shiftlessness isn’t part of the American self-image.”
Plymouth, by contrast, carried a message that suited a nation of striving immigrants. “Here, the story line is ‘Live in excruciating poverty for years and work hard and eventually your family will prosper.’ ”
This uplifting narrative required careful editing. After first landing at Cape Cod, the hungry English looted Indians’ buried stores of corn. Also, the epidemic that preceded the English to Plymouth not only provided them a harbor, fresh water, and cleared fields to sow; it gave them a chance to settle in without immediately inciting natives, as had happened so often at earlier beachheads. The Pilgrims’ nearest neighbors, Massasoit’s people, lived miles inland and had been ravaged by disease. They were in no position to resist the newcomers, even if they’d been so inclined, and they greeted the Pilgrims peacefully.
“If it wasn’t for the plague,” Dan said, “the story here might have been a lot uglier from the start, like Jamestown’s.”
Before long, it became so. Within a few years of the Mayflower’s arrival, colonists clashed with Indians and stuck the bloody head of a defeated foe on a pike atop Plymouth’s fort. But the Pilgrim story familiar to most Americans had been radically abridged, encompassing only the colony’s first year: the Pilgrims sailed, signed the Mayflower Compact, landed at Plymouth Rock, suffered through winter, and celebrated the first harvest with kindly Indians.
“Thanksgiving, I can’t thank thee enough,” Dan said, donning his drab hat and dead-leaf jacket to perform with the Puritones at a sold-out autumn banquet. “ ’Tis what keeps us weary Pilgrims employed.”
THANKSGIVING WAS THE third and most exalted of Plymouth’s trinity, holier even than the Mayflower and the Rock. It carried the story of America’s founding out of Plymouth and into millions of homes, renewing memory of the Pilgrims each autumn over turkey, sweet potato, and pumpkin pie.
The only people who might be surprised by this would be the Pilgrims themselves. They wrote thousands of words about the colony’s first years, and all of two paragraphs about their famous repast. They didn’t record its date or call it a thanksgiving, which to Calvinists signified a solemn religious observance. They didn’t even specify turkey as one of the dishes served.
“Our harvest being gotten in,” one settler wrote, “our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after a special manner rejoice together.” The hunters had great success. But there’s no mention of whether they bagged turkey rather than geese or duck.
Nor did Pilgrims initially intend for Indians to share in the bounty. Massasoit and ninety men turned up unannounced, almost tripling the number of mouths to feed. The Indians went out and hunted deer, adding venison to the menu for the three days of feasting that followed. Fish was also abundant, and corn, in some form, was doubtless consumed. But of the many familiar trimmings—pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce—there is no written evidence.
Like Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim feast was also forgotten for many generations. New Englanders continued to hold harvest feasts and days of religious thanksgiving—to mark, among other events, their bloody victories over Indians. But it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that writers rediscovered the 1621 meal, recasting it as the “first Thanksgiving,” an antecedent to what had become a Yankee tradition of homecoming feasts, with turkey often served as the centerpiece.
The key figure in this revival was Sarah Josepha Hale, a New Hampshire native who wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” As editor of an influential women’s periodical, she waged a long campaign to turn the New England rite into a national holiday. Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union and to give “humble penitence for our national perverseness.” He made no mention of turkey or Pilgrims.
The holiday took hold—despite resistance from Southerners—and evolved into a secular celebration of American abundance. The Plymouth story also became a touchstone for immigrants. According to a 1934 citizenship manual, “every new Ame
rican needed to know” about Pilgrims, who exemplified the ethos of hard work and liberty.
Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday.
WHILE THE PILGRIMS and their abstemious ways have faded from the American scene, the Indian tribe they dined with in 1621 remains on the premises. In 1970, the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing, a Wampanoag leader convened a Thanksgiving protest beside the Massasoit statue atop Cole’s Hill. After declaring the fourth Thursday in November a “Day of Mourning” and giving speeches denouncing the Pilgrims, the protestors pulled down the English flag from the replica Mayflower, threw sand on the Rock, and turned over tables at a Thanksgiving dinner they’d been invited to at Plimoth Plantation. A holiday intended to celebrate harmony between newcomers and natives had turned into its opposite.
The Day of Mourning became an annual rite. In 1996, protestors marked it by disrupting a sedate Plymouth tradition, a local procession to church called the Pilgrim Progress. When activists tried to repeat this the next year, police moved in with pepper spray and handcuffs, provoking a much-publicized and embarrassing mêlée. In its wake, the town officially recognized the Day of Mourning and erected yet another plaque on Cole’s Hill, acknowledging that for Indians, “Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture.”
Tensions had since eased, and Plymoutheans now marked the weekend before the autumn holiday with an elaborate “America’s Hometown Thanksgiving Parade.” I arrived to find thousands of people lining the streets as floats and marchers streamed past, representing every era and every organization for miles around. Pilgrims, waving gaily from a mock Mayflower, jostled with unicyclists, vintage cars, marching bands, Revolutionary War soldiers, and Boston cops wearing kilts and blowing bagpipes, cheered on by onlookers in windbreakers and Red Sox caps.
In this cheerful, gaudy scene, one group of marchers stood out. All male, the marchers wore black suits and top hats and strode two by two, trailing a cannon and a banner marked “Old Colony Club.” They looked like Victorian mourners who had taken a wrong turn and fallen in with a mob of Plymouth townies.
“This isn’t our big day,” one of the black-suited men said, as I struggled along the crowded curb, trying to keep up.
“What is?” I asked.
“Forefathers’ Day. Much older than Thanksgiving and more significant.”
This was news. But I couldn’t gather more in the crush and noise of the parade. The man gave me the club’s address and invited me to join the group for Forefathers’ Day, a month hence. The gathering, oddly, began at 5:30 A.M. “Dress warmly and bring earplugs,” he advised, tipping his top hat and marching on.
The intervening weeks gave me time to research the enigmatic club and its holiday. Both dated to 1769, when seven men in Plymouth formed a private club to avoid “the many disadvantages and inconveniences that arise from intermixing with the company at the taverns in this town.” The date they chose for their annual meeting was December 22, anniversary of the first English settlers’ arrival at Plymouth.
To mark the occasion in 1769, club members fired a cannon, raised a silk flag emblazoned with “Old Colony 1620,” and retired to enjoy a “decent repast” of clams, oysters, cod, eels, venison, succotash, Indian pudding, cranberry tarts, and apple pie. Though substantial, the food was chosen to reflect the fare eaten by early settlers, and “dressed in the plainest manner . . . in imitation of our ancestors.” Repeated in following years, the tradition became known as Forefathers’ Day (the term “Pilgrims” wasn’t applied to the Mayflower passengers until the nineteenth century).
“Top of the morning to you!” said the man who greeted me in the foyer of the Old Colony Club building on Plymouth’s main street. It was 5:15 A.M. and the club was already crowded with men in tuxedoes. Given the formal attire, and the club’s snobby origins, I’d expected to find WASPish Mayflower descendants sipping tea from bone china, in finely appointed rooms from the pages of Yankee Clipper. Instead, the interior of the white clapboard building had sloping floors, water-stained wallpaper, and simple furnishings. Portraits of club presidents hung askew. Walls, shelves, and glass cases were stuffed with dusty items donated or abandoned by former members: pipes, tobacco tins, elephant tusks.
“We’re a men’s club; our wives aren’t here to make us behave or clean up,” one of the members said, showing me an antique card room with standing ashtrays and yellowed rules on the wall for the club’s only game, called bestia. “It’s extinct everywhere but here,” my guide said. “Appropriate, I guess.”
If the club was a throwback, it was no longer the blue-blooded establishment of earlier centuries. Members had to be upstanding citizens of Plymouth or nearby Duxbury, and could be denied entry if a single member slipped a black cube into the club’s old wooden ballot box. But many of the men I met had Irish, Italian, or Portuguese surnames, including the club’s most distinguished member, the Reverend Peter Gomes, a brown-skinned, gray-haired man wearing round horn-rims and carrying a cane. A renowned clergyman who preached at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, he spoke in orotund phrases, even at 5:30 in the morning.
“Convening at this hour gives off the odor of ancient activity,” he said. “And it’s a pleasant form of lark that permits us to boast for the rest of the year about rising in the cold and dark.”
Gomes’s lineage was a mix of African-American and Portuguese from the Atlantic island of Cape Verde. This made him a rather unusual celebrant of the Mayflower’s arrival. As Malcolm X observed: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; that rock landed on us.” But having grown up by the famous stone, Gomes saw the Pilgrims differently.
“I’ve always liked them, if not necessarily their descendants,” he said. “They were full of adventure, a little naïve, not altogether successful—unlike the Puritans of Boston. They did the best they could, but weren’t really hustlers. Yet Americans have chosen to remember them.”
This was an intriguing take, and I wanted to hear more. But it was almost six A.M., time for the Forefathers’ Day rites to begin. A man called out, “Let’s go, Pilgrims,” and everyone donned top hats, scarves, and overcoats. It was still dark out, the tail end of the longest night of the year. “Balmy,” one of the men declared, his breath clouding in the frigid air.
By the standards of late December in New England, the weather was indeed temperate; only a little below freezing, without wind or snow. The men, about a hundred in all, lined up behind flag bearers, a small band, and, at the head, the club’s oldest member, a stooped ninety-nine-year-old with a cane and cape. At the command “Forward march!” they proceeded along the main street and down a lane to the crest of Cole’s Hill. Four men wheeled forward the small cannon I’d seen at the Thanksgiving parade.
The club president intoned an abridged version of the proclamation issued in 1769, invoking the memory of Plymouth’s forefathers but omitting the original expressions of loyalty to the Mother Country. Then the gun crew captain shouted, “Ram the charge! Prick the charge! Fuse the cannon! Fire!”
A deafening blast roared out across the harbor where the first settlers sailed in, followed by a cloud of smoke. The cannon fired a second and third time, the club members waving their top hats and crying, “Hip, hip, hooray!”
This was, in part, an expression of relief. I’d been told the cannon sometimes failed; at one July 4 parade, it had fired prematurely, wounding the hand of a member of the gun crew and propelling a ramrod above the heads of holiday marchers. This time the blasts were harmless, although they no doubt woke anyone sleeping within a mile of the hill.
“They’ll not forget the Pilgrims, that’s for sure,” Reverend
Gomes quipped, pulling at his watch fob. It was 6:16 A.M. and light was just starting to pink the rim of the harbor. The men resumed marching, past the sarcophagus of Pilgrim bones, up Leyden Street, the oldest in Plymouth and named for the Dutch town from which the Pilgrims departed, then back along the main street, past Sean O’Toole’s pub and Di Marzio Insurance and Bangkok Thai Cuisine.
“Our labors are done,” Gomes said, as we returned to the club, having walked no more than a half mile. “What I love about the Old Colony is that it has no redeeming merit. You can join the Kiwanis if you want to perform good works. We do that in our other walks of life. Here, nothing is required, only this annual observance.”
Like the club’s founders, the men retired for a “decent repast,” though not quite the daylong gorging of 1769. After a breakfast of sausage, eggs, baked beans, and ham, they dispersed to home or work, and returned at day’s end for a traditional dinner of succotash.
In the seventeenth century, succotash—its name derived from an Algonquian word, possibly meaning “mixed”—denoted a pottage of beans, corn, and meat. A staple of the Indian diet, succotash wasn’t beloved of early settlers. “Broth,” William Wood called it in 1634, “made thick with fishes, fowls, and beasts boiled all together, some remaining raw, the rest converted by over-much seething to a loathed mash.”
In the centuries since, “succotash” had become a catch-all label for a range of American dishes, but in Plymouth it still hewed to native and colonial tradition. “The old recipe says to cook corned beef in one pot and fowl in another,” Cynthia Sykes said, stirring a tan-colored soup in the Old Colony’s basement kitchen. “I do that, but not the other part, which says to put the pots outside, hanging on broomsticks to cool.”
She’d cooked the beef and chicken, as well as venison, for four hours, then mixed their juices with navy beans, turnip, and hominy, or hulled corn. “I serve this brown goop in bowls, with the meat on the side,” she said. “That’s the traditional way. And no salt or spices.”
