Plymouth Rock: The Legend and the Boulder

Plymouth Rock has the unusual distinction of being one of the most famous historical sites in America and also one of the most thoroughly constructed. The Pilgrims themselves never mentioned any particular rock in their writings. The first known written reference to a significant boulder at the landing place appears in seventeen fifteen town records, which describe it as a property boundary marker.

The first claim that this specific rock was the actual Pilgrim landing place was made by a ninety-four-year-old man named Thomas Faunce in seventeen forty one, more than a century after the Pilgrims arrived. Faunce said a long-dead resident had told him the story years before. That fragile chain of hearsay did not prevent the rock from becoming a national icon.

In seventeen seventy four, an attempt was made to haul the boulder to the town square to inspire Revolutionary sentiment, and it broke in half during the effort. By the late nineteenth century Plymouth Rock was a pilgrimage site for Americans seeking a physical connection to their founding mythology. In eighteen eighty the broken top half was reunited with the base, the date sixteen twenty was chiseled onto its surface.

A protective canopy had already been built over it in eighteen sixty-seven. In nineteen twenty the rock was relocated again to its current position near Pilgrim Memorial State Park, under a classical portico designed to give the boulder the gravitas its legend demands. Visitors are frequently astonished by how small it is, a boulder roughly the size of a large kitchen table, carrying on its modest back the full weight of American origin mythology.