WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Posted by Sheila Connolly

Since the Thanksgiving holiday is upon us, we thought we'd take a look at different aspects of the holiday and what it means to us.  Since I'm first in the queue, I'll talk about the first Thanksgiving.

I live about fifteen miles from Plymouth, Massachusetts, site of the first permanent settlement in the colony that would become the United States.  Okay, I know that the Roanoke Colony came earlier, but they couldn't hang on (thus generating one of the first mysteries on our soil).  There were also plenty of trappers and traders who roamed the lands and rivers (spreading germs to the Indians), but they didn't stick around.

Which leaves those hardy Pilgrims of Plymouth.  We probably all got hit over the head with the Mayflower story in elementary school (at least if you lived on the East Coast as I did).  The romance of Priscilla Alden and Miles Standish.  The happy natives sharing their lore and their corn and fish to help the settlers survive the first winter, for which they were woefully unprepared.  They should have known better than to land in November, but that wasn't altogether their fault–the boat ran late.

Anyway, recently I've had a chance to get to know modern Plymouth.  It's an interesting place.  I first saw it decades ago, although I didn't do a lot of sightseeing–more like, yup, there's that rock.  We moved to southeastern Massachusetts six years ago, and when I first revisited Plymouth, I thought it was kind of a stodgy, seedy little town.  The rock was still there.  I did visit Plimoth Plantation, which is perhaps the best living history museum in the country, and worth the trip if you have any interest in history.

Over the past few years Plymouth has kind of reinvented itself.  The main street downtown is dotted with interesting restaurants and shops of all sorts.  A couple of upscale malls have sprung up on the outskirts.  My doctor has an office in The Pinehills, a huge residential development that's like a little city unto itself, with a market, a bank, and a variety of shops, all in sparkly-bright and very clean new buildings, and not one but two golf courses.  A derelict rope-making center on one end of town has morphed into an interesting industrial and office park now called Cordage Park.

But that's the modern city, and I was talking about history.  I've may have mentioned before that I'm a genealogist (no!  really?), and, yes, I have identified one Mayflower ancestor.  Poor guy, he died less than a month after the Mayflower landed, and he may never have set foot on the ground (his wife came over on another ship three years later, with their two daughters, and I'm descended from one of them).  For years I felt like he was kind of a second-class Pilgrim, until I learned that fully half of the original passengers died in that first year.  In fact, the settlers were so worried that the Indians would notice that their ranks were dwindling rapidly that they didn't even set up a burial ground for the dead–they buried them by the dark of night in unmarked graves.  For the tri-centennial of the landing, the townspeople collected all the bones they'd been unearthing for years and had squirreled away in various places around town and installed them all in a substantial granite sarcophagus, so at least they're together, for perhaps the first time since 1621.

But the settlers survived that first hard year, and more settlers arrived (along with food supplies), and as people kept dying, they did in fact create a cemetery.  It's up on the hill above the town, where the first palisade stood.  Several years ago I visited that cemetery for the first time, and I was surprised by how much it moved me.  Strip away all the buildings and the docks laid out below, and imagine open space along the shore, with a few people moving around, maybe a few cattle or pigs.  Behind you stands the pitifully small wooden fort, large enough to contain the handful of citizens and the precious livestock.  And behind that?  Nobody knew.  Imagine the weight of those endless miles of unknown territory, peopled by unpredictable natives, while you and your tiny band clung to the coast and hoped that you'd survive, which was far from guaranteed.

I came away from that place with a heightened respect for those first settlers.  Their reasons for coming–financial, political or religious–may have varied, but whatever the reason it took a lot of courage to make that leap into the unknown.

They survived because they were lucky:  a couple of plagues in the years before they arrived had wiped out over 90% of the local Indian population, which left already-cleared land for them to occupy and cultivate–and nobody left to resist them.  And the settlers didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in their ongoing relationship with what few Indians remained:  they robbed the survivors, and even plundered the graves of their dead.  It's a wonder the Indians helped them at all.

But they did.  The first Thanksgiving took place in the fall of 1621, after a good harvest, with some 90 Wampanoags attending.  Here's Edward Winslow's account from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1621:

"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."

Many of us may be facing hard times these days, but put yourself in the place of those First Settlers in 1621–it may make you feel better. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Comments

[Angela]

Sorry, but Plymouth wasn't the first settlement. Jamestown was settled 16 years earlier and St. Augustine, FL, by the Spanish, is actually the oldest settlement of them all in the New World. Still they are all wonderful places of great historical significance.

[Glenda]

Sheila it's a wonderful blog and it does make me stop and think. It's so easy to add up all the issues facing us today but the picture you painted of the hardships that faced the early settlers really put things into perspective. And I can't even imagine the courage they had to come over to this "new world" to begin with. I don't think I could have done it, myself. I would have wanted to but...

[Jeanne]

Well, Priscilla and Miles might have had a romance, but she married John Alden instead, and I'm a direct descendent. They were tough folks, for sure. Jeanne