Today in 1620, people aboard the English ship Mayflower dropped anchor at what is now known as Plymouth Harbor in Massachusetts.
The popular version of the story has it that the people known today as the Pilgrims made that landing upon a very special rock.
Except that the story of a landing at Plymouth Rock didn’t come for more than a century after the Pilgrims arrived, and once it did, Americans had a hard time taking care of that supposedly sacred stone.
There wouldn’t be a Plymouth Rock without Thomas Faunce, who had served as town clerk for Plymouth, Massachusetts.
In 1741, the community was looking to build a new wharf, to which Faunce said, but that’s going to cover up the spot where the Pilgrims landed!
Faunce said both his dad, who had come to Plymouth just a few years after the first Pilgrim landing, and some of those first Mayflower travelers had told him that there was a big boulder right where the ship’s passengers had landed.
People in town gave the then-94 year old a three-mile ride in his chair down to the harbor, so he could point to the specific boulder.
None of the Pilgrims had mentioned anything about a boulder in their writings back in 1620, and it’s important to remember that they had come to Plymouth only after first landing in Provincetown.
But Faunce’s account was enough to convince Plymouth that the rock had been a part of history, and its legend only grew from there.
By the 1770s, colonists who were protesting the British government thought it would be a grand statement to start making their speeches while standing on Plymouth Rock.
They sent 20 teams of oxen to bring it from the harbor to the town square, but while loading the stone into a carriage, the movers ended up cracking the thing in half.
The top half went into town; the rest stayed on the shore, where souvenir hunters chipped away at it.
One very large piece would later be found in use as a doorstop.
In the 1830s, Plymouth moved some of the rock from the town meetinghouse to the front yard of a museum, and along the way it fell out of a cart and cracked.
Eventually, the community decided it would gather all of the pieces it had, rejoin them with cement, and put them back at the harbor to sit under a new structure.
Initially that structure was a canopy, but in 1920, three hundred years after the Pilgrims’ landing, Plymouth built a stone portico near the water.
Can you guess what happened when they moved Plymouth Rock from its old home to the new one?
It cracked. Again.
Though a user on Reddit argued that, hey, people have done a lot of ridiculous things to this rock, a rock that may not even be what people say it is, and yet it’s still kind of hanging in there… which is kind of inspiring.
Plymouth Rock may be a part of history, but that doesn’t mean it’s exciting to visit.
Thrillist compiled some visitor reviews, many of which read like this one: “It’s a rock. Just a rock, not particularly a big rock. Didn’t really have a bunch of historical information or things to read, kind of just a pit with a rock in it.”
I guess sometimes a rock is just a rock.
Thomas Faunce: The Man Who Saved Plymouth Rock (New England Historical Society)
The Funniest Reviews of Plymouth Rock Left by Disappointed Tourists (Thrillist)
