Pilgrims' stone still defines nation

PLYMOUTH, Mass. -- An ancient, icy Atlantic wind churns Plymouth Harbor, the sky spreads a slate gloom, and some teen-agers stare solemnly at a boulder caged in a sand pit, like a circus act.

The year "1620" is carved in its flank. A fat seam of mortar fills a diagonal crack. A marker for modern pilgrims identifies this pale, plump chunk of granite -- just six feet across -- as Plymouth Rock.

"Tradition tells us that the Pilgrims stepped upon this rock when they arrived in Plymouth in December of 1620," drones the sign at Pilgrim Memorial State Park.

But Matt Souza of nearby Lakeville, a teen-ager with a baseball cap and pierced ear, heard it differently.

"I heard it came from a quarry in Quincy. My dad supposedly knows the guy that moved it. That's how it got cracked," he says.

The sign's version may be only slightly less cracked.

'An ongoing hoax'

Most historians have concluded that the widely accepted story of The Rock is likely a crock, a rousing myth first fanned by Revolutionary War passions and later by New England's regional superiority complex. Scholar John Seelye, who wrote the 1998 study "Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock," says it stands at the center of "what amounts to an ongoing hoax."

We all know the story: In the winter of 1620, the bedraggled Pilgrims from the Mayflower, rebuffing the Church of England, spilled from their scouting boat onto Plymouth Rock. They stopped there and struck noble or prayerful poses for the benefit of unborn illustrators. Then they set out to father a country.

The truth? Well, to start with, both Pilgrims and Rock were there. Geologists believe the boulder was deposited by a glacier about 30,000 years ago. The Pilgrims built their first homes just up the hill from The Rock. But William Bradford, their chief chronicler, later wrote that they simply "marched into ye land."

Not a word survives about ye rock until nearly a century later. In 1715, a town surveying record takes note of this boulder, the hulk of the beach. But it mentions it simply as a rock -- not The Rock.

Born in local oral tradition, the story of The Rock only catches on more broadly decades later, as the colonists contemplate a split from England. They start to build their new identity on a rock.

'A ready-made symbol'

"It was kind of a ready-made symbol," says Robert Arner, a University of Cincinnati professor who has written about colonial America. "It never was about a stone as stone. Otherwise, they would have blown it out of the way to make room for a wharf."

In fact, there was a plan for a wharf around 1741. Fearing that a certain boulder would be buried underneath, Thomas Faunce, a 95-year-old church elder, wanted to be carried down to the beach on a chair for one last look.

The old man told how his father had spoken of this rock as the place where the forefathers first stepped onto the new homeland.

The problem is, the Faunce story survives mainly through James Thacher's 1832 "History of Plymouth."

"It's almost comical anyone would have believed it," says Richard Shenkman, who writes about historical fictions and edits an on-line history magazine at George Mason University.