Wikipedia (
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"Plymouth Rock is the traditional site of disembarkation of William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. It is an important symbol in American history. There are no contemporaneous references to the Pilgrims' landing on a rock at Plymouth, and it is not referred to in Edward Winslow's Mourt's Relation (1620–21) or in Bradford's journal Of Plymouth Plantation (1620–47).
The first written reference to the rock's existence was recorded in 1715, when it is described in the town boundary records as "a great rock." The first written reference to Pilgrims landing on a rock is found 121 years after they landed. The Rock, or one traditionally identified as it, has long been memorialized on the shore of Plymouth Harbor in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
History of Plymouth Rock
The Plymouth Rock (more specifically, Dedham granodiorite, a glacial erratic), had lain at the foot of Cole's Hill from generation to generation until the century after the Pilgrims' landing in 1620. When plans were afoot to build a wharf at the Pilgrims' landing site in 1741, a 94-year-old elder of the church named Thomas Faunce, then living 3 miles from the spot, declared that he knew the precise boulder on which the Mayflower pilgrims first stepped when disembarking. As recounted in the 1897 book, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, the standard story goes:
The real Plymouth Rock was a boulder about fifteen feet long and three feet wide which lay with its point to the east, thus forming a convenient pier for boats to land during certain hours of tide. This rock is authenticated as the pilgrims' landing place by the testimony of Elder Faunce who in 1741 at the age of ninety-five was carried in a chair to the rock, that he might pass down to posterity the testimony of pilgrims whom he had personally known on this important matter.
Faunce's father had arrived at the colony aboard the Anne in 1623, more than 2 years after the Mayflower landing, and Elder Faunce himself had been born in 1647, but Faunce insisted that not only his father but several of the original Mayflower passengers had, when he was a youth, identified the precise rock to him. Faunce was brought in a chair to the shore, in the presence of most of the town, and he reportedly began weeping at what he was sure would be his last sight of the rock, which he identified. Although Faunce identified the rock in 1741, it was not moved from the shore until 1774.
There have been doubts hinted about the accuracy of Faunce's identification, in view of his age and the dates of the landing and his birth, but there is no doubt that he grew up in Plymouth at a time when many of the original passengers were still there. The Pilgrims first landed, however, near the site of modern Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620 before moving to Plymouth. The rock is located about 650 feet (200 m) from where it is generally accepted that the initial settlement was built, on nearby Leyden Street leading up toward Burial Hill.
Bill Bryson questions the story in Made in America,
The one thing the Pilgrims certainly did not do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from near by.
—Bill Bryson, Made in America"