137 Warren Avenue
Plymouth, MA 02360
Phone: 508-746-1622
www.plimoth.org
“[Plimoth]is well situated upon a high hill close to the seaside. . . . In this plantation is about twenty houses, four or five of which are very fair and peasant, and the rest (as time will serve) shall be made better. And this town is in such manner that it makes a great street between the houses . . . and lastly, the town is furnished with a company of honest men . . .”
— EMMANUEL ALTHAM, A VISITOR IN 1623
Before the coming of the English, this area was called Patuxet by the Wampanoag people. It was visited twice by Europeans before the arrival of the Pilgrims, first in 1605 by Samuel de Champlain (1574–1635), who called this Port St. Louis. Then Captain John Smith (1580–1631) named it “New Plimoth” after an English city in 1614. Captain Smith’s place names seemed to stick, as he also dubbed the wider region “New England.”
The Pilgrims (both Puritans and Strangers) arrived here on December 12, 1620. Many did not survive the first winter, with little shelter and almost no food. The Wampanoag neighbors gave food to the Pilgrims and showed them how to grow corn and other crops. After the first harvest in 1621, both the English and the Indians joined in what has traditionally been called the first Thanksgiving.
Plimoth Plantation as we know it today was begun by Henry Hornblower II (1917–1985). A Bostonian and a financial analyst, his love for Plymouth and its history began when he was a boy spending summers on his family’s Plymouth estate. In 1947 Hornblower built two English cottages, and ten years later the Mayflower II sailed from England to America and permanently docked here. The reproduction English Village was built on its present site in 1959, and the Wampanoag Homesite was built in 1973.
Frozen in time, the small English maritime and farming village appears today as it was in the 1620s. The houses that populate the Plantation today are as described by the visitor Altham. Cottages are modest in size, have dirt floors and thatched roofs, and are sparely furnished with reproductions of seventeenth-century English furniture. Kitchen gardens complete the plots. This is a living history museum, and the guide-interpreters in the village are not just dressed in period costume. They also play the roles of specific Pilgrims and speak with the vocabulary and accent of seventeenth-century English folk. Don’t confuse them with conversation about cars or cell phones. They won’t know what you’re talking about!
The Wampanoag Homesite is located along the shore of the Eel River. Clustered here are “wigwams” or houses. The “wetu” is a mat-covered house. The “nush wetu” is a long house covered with bark, and within there are three firepits. Guide-interpreters are Native Americans dressed in historically correct attire, most of which is deerskin. The guides speak in modern American English and engage visitors in conversations about the Native people who lived here in the seventeenth century, along with their lives, work, and activities, including fishing, hunting, and the growing of crops.
In addition to the homesite and village, Plimoth Plantation has the Hornblower Visitor Center, Craft Center, Maxwell and Nye Barns, and the Gristmill. The Mayflower II, an accurate re-creation of the Pilgrims’ ship, is docked in downtown Plymouth and welcomes visitors on board.