Plymouth Waterfront

Leyden Street was the first street laid out in Plymouth and the location of the first Pilgrim homes, with views from this area of Cole’s Hill, the waterfront, Leyden Street leading to Town Square, and Burial Hill. English settlers chose this site for their new settlement after three days of surveying along the coast because Plymouth’s protected bay and the fresh water of Town Brook made it a good location, and they officially disembarked on December 21, 1620. Plymouth Rock became internationally famous as the supposed landing place of the Pilgrims, although no historical evidence supports the tradition that they first set foot there. The first identification of Plymouth Rock as the actual landing site came in 1741 from 94-year-old Thomas Faunce, whose father had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, three years after the Mayflower. The rock lies roughly 650 feet from where the initial settlement was built. In 1774, efforts to move it to Town Square split it into two pieces, leaving the lower half on the waterfront while the upper half was moved to Plymouth center and later to a fenced enclosure in front of Pilgrim Hall. In 1880, the upper piece was rejoined with the lower half and placed under a Victorian canopy designed by Hammatt Billings, when the date 1620 was inscribed on the rock; in 1921, both sections were lowered to their original sea-level position under the present canopy. Plymouth Rock is the centerpiece of Pilgrim Memorial State Park, the smallest park in the Massachusetts State Forest and Park System and also the most heavily visited. Plymouth’s fishing schooners formed the backbone of its commercial fleet around 1870. Mayflower II, a full-size reproduction of the Mayflower, was built in Brixham, England, in 1956, sailed across the Atlantic to Plymouth in 1957 by Alan Villiers, is located at the State Pier in Plymouth Center, serves as a museum about the Pilgrims’ voyage from Plymouth, England, and remains seaworthy. Town Brook, a 1.5-mile stream flowing from Billington Sea through Brewster Garden into Plymouth Harbor, provided the freshwater that drew the Pilgrims to settle there and sustained the early settlement through difficult times. Squanto taught the settlers to fish for herring and use them as fertilizer for corn crops, and later Town Brook became Plymouth’s first center of industrialization as its water powered numerous mills that shaped the town’s nineteenth-century history.

Plymouth, Massachusetts · United States