the small band of Pilgrims from the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth on Monday, December 11, 1620. There is an arcane debate about whether that date corresponds to December 21 or December 22 on the Gregorian calendar we use today, and Plymoutheans politely agree to disagree. That’s why the Pilgrim Society holds its Forefathers Day dinner on December 21, while the Old Colony Club marks the day on December 22.
The Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth is often called “the Landing,” usually spelled with that grandiose capital letter. Legend has it that the Pilgrims stepped onto the terra firma of the New World by way of a massive boulder on the shoreline. This is the Plymouth Rock that has gained iconic status in American culture. There is, however, no historical evidence to confirm its role in Plymouth’s history. Bradford doesn’t mention the rock in his monumental history of the founding and early years of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. Nor does it put in an appearance in the extant letters from the period. Rather, the legend of the rock came to light in 1741 when an elderly townsman by the name of Thomas Faunce, upset that a wharf was going to be built over the boulder, claimed that it had been the stepping stone of the first Pilgrims as they came ashore.
Faunce was not a reliable witness. For one thing, he was ninety-four years old at the time he recounted the story of the rock. No matter how sound his elderly mind may have been or how prodigious his memory, he was relating a story he had heard as a child, three-quarters of a century earlier. Moreover, the story came to him at third hand. He said he had heard about the boulder from his father, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, three years after the Pilgrims. The elder Faunce told his son that he had learned about the rock from residents who had been passengers on the Mayflower.
The logistics of the Landing also make the story of the rock unlikely. As the writer Bill Bryson has observed, “No prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from nearby.”2
The story of Plymouth Rock is a myth, but the heroic Landing is not. The small band of Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth in December 1620 were part of an exploratory party from the Mayflower tasked with scouting out locations for a permanent settlement. The Mayflower had reached Cape Cod in mid-November and set anchor off the tip of the peninsula in the harbor of what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. The English settlers knew that their survival in the New World would depend heavily on their ability to farm, and they quickly determined that the sandy soil of Cape Cod was unsuitable for that purpose. So the scouting party set off to seek a more propitious location. They hoped to settle on a site for their new home before the winter set in.
Eighteen men—Pilgrims and crew—set sail in a small boat called a shallop that had been carried in pieces aboard the Mayflower and then assembled at Cape Cod. The men on the shallop were looking for a protected harbor that one of the Mayflower’s pilots recalled from a fishing expedition he had made several years earlier. The pilot had only a vague recollection of the harbor’s location, but he thought he would be able to find it once they were in the area.
By then it was December, and the weather was unpredictable. Soon the shallop and its passengers were caught up in a violent storm—rain, snow, sleet, wind. The shallop’s mast snapped in three places and the rudder broke. The little party managed to get their boat ashore and take shelter on what they later discovered was a tiny island.
Mark Twain would later observe that “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, wait a few minutes.” So it was for the Pilgrims, who woke the next morning to a perfect day. Saturday dawned “fair” and “sunshining,” wrote Bradford, who was among the marooned men. The Pilgrims explored the island, dried their clothes, repaired the shallop, and, Bradford tells us, “gave God thanks for His mercies in their manifold deliverances.”3 In some sense, this was the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving on land in the New World.
The following day was Sunday, so the party rested and worshipped. On Monday, they departed the island and sailed the short distance across the harbor to the place that would become their new home.
Forefathers Day was born in 1769, when seven upstanding men of Plymouth decided to form a social club. Their motives were a mix of the sacred and the profane.
First, the profane: According to the minutes of the club’s inaugural meeting, the founders wished to have a private venue where they could gather away from the local hoi polloi. They wanted to be free from “intermixing with the company at the taverns in this town.” A “well-regulated club” would increase “the pleasure and happiness of the respective members” and also “conduce to their edification and instruction.” They incorporated their new society under the name Old Colony Club.4
The new club wasn’t just about drinking. It had a higher purpose too, one that the founders considered a sacred duty. The seven original members, proud of their town’s history, decided to solemnize the anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims by means of an annual celebration. The inaugural Forefathers Day was also known as “Old Colony Day” or the “First Celebration of the Landing of our Forefathers.”5
Club records provide a detailed account. The first Forefathers Day dinner took place at 2:30 in the afternoon at a local inn. The meal began with an Indian pudding, which was followed by a course of succotash and then one of clams, oysters, and codfish. Next came venison that had been roasted on a jack that the Pilgrims had brought with them on the Mayflower. The venison course was followed by “sea fowl”—probably gulls or cormorants—and eels. Dessert was apple pie, cranberry tarts, and cheese.
Succotash—a stew of corn and beans—became the traditional culinary feature of Forefathers Day dinners, as essential to the celebration of that holiday as turkey is to Thanksgiving. The word “succotash” is an Anglicized version of the Narragansett word sohquttahhash, whose literal meaning is corn beaten into small pieces. Tradition has it that the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to make succotash.
It is fair to say that succotash is an acquired taste. The author of an 1883 cookbook warns that “strangers are rather shy of this peculiar mixture.”6 At Forefathers Day dinners in Plymouth in the twenty-first century, a tureen of succotash is set out on a table across from the bar during the cocktail hour. Guests are invited to help themselves. The line at the bar is longer.7
Toasting is another Forefathers Day tradition. Several toasts were offered at the first Forefathers Day dinner in 1769, including one to those “kings under whose indulgent care this colony has flourished and been protected.” According to James Thacher, who wrote an authoritative history of Plymouth that was published in 1835, the group conversed in “an agreeable manner” about “our forefathers.” The agreeable manner did not last long, and in 1773 the Old Colony Club folded. Thacher is discreet about the breakup, which was precipitated by disagreement about the most contentious issue of the day: independence for the thirteen colonies. Thacher hints at the acrimony that must have pervaded club events when he writes blandly that “unfortunately, some of the members were attached to the royal interest.” In other words, the membership of the Old Colony Club, like the citizens of the thirteen colonies, was sharply divided over whether to toast George III or curse him. Among club members loyal to the Crown was Edward Winslow Jr., a descendant of the Pilgrim of the same name. At the outbreak of war in 1776, the younger Winslow fled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after fighting at the Battle of Lexington on the side of the British.
But Loyalists were in the minority in Plymouth. By the time the Old Colony Club disbanded in 1773, most Plymoutheans had joined in support of Bostonians’ protests against the Crown, and they welcomed the erection of a liberty pole in a place of honor in the town square. As Thacher tells it, they condemned “the tyrannical attempts of the British government to enslave our country,” voted to boycott British goods, deplored taxation without their consent, and opposed the British quartering of soldiers in Boston.8 Forefathers Day celebrations resumed in 1774 under the auspices of the town of Plymouth. A century later, in 1875, the Old Colony Club was revived and took up its early tradition once again.