The Monument to the Forefathers

Up on a hill a short walk from Plymouth's waterfront stands a monument that almost no one visits, which is strange because it is thought to be the largest solid granite monument in the world. The National Monument to the Forefathers rises eighty-one feet from its base, an enormous stone figure of Faith standing with one hand pointing toward heaven and the other clutching a Bible. Four smaller figures at the base represent the virtues the monument's creators believed the Pilgrims embodied: Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty.

The project began in the eighteen fifties under the designer Hammatt Billings, who originally envisioned something twice as large. The Civil War interrupted construction and dried up funding. The cornerstone was laid in August of eighteen fifty nine, and the monument was not finally dedicated until August first, eighteen eighty nine, thirty years later.

The granite came from quarries in Maine. The symbolism is overwhelmingly Protestant and providential, a Victorian reading of Pilgrim history that emphasizes divine destiny over the more complicated human story of survival, disease, diplomacy, and dispossession. The monument tells you more about what America wanted to believe about itself in eighteen eighty nine than it tells you about what actually happened in sixteen twenty.

But as a piece of granite engineering sitting quietly in a Plymouth neighborhood, largely overlooked by the tour buses that stop at the Rock down the hill, it is genuinely spectacular.