![]() ![]() In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. This year that number may be less than half. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. T his year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.” I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers our sympathy in their sufferings our gratitude for their labors our admiration of their virtues our veneration for their piety and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.īy 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. ![]() It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. ![]() For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century-odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. T here is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |