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    Plymouth
    Plymouth
    Plymouth
    Ebook179 pages1 hour

    Plymouth

    By James W. Baker

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    Plymouth is best known as the Pilgrim landing place, but history did not stop when the dishes were cleared away from the first Thanksgiving. A prosperous fishing village before the War of 1812, Plymouth developed mills and factories to line its modest brooks during the Industrial Revolution, and elegant dwellings were built to replace humble Colonial homes. Steamboats and the railway brought waves of immigrants and summer visitors, transforming the small Yankee village into a bustling town. Later, the mills closed, tourist traffic replaced the clatter of machinery, and massive housing developments transformed the town as the kaleidoscope of history turned yet again. Plymouth's intriguing past is not altogether lost. In Plymouth, the reader will find the elm-shaded streets, mill villages, modest shops, and rustic pond-side cottages that generations of residents and visitors have loved. The reader will see vanished landmarks, such as the Samoset House and the Mayflower Inn, the Cornish and Burton schools, and the Leyden Street Casino. From the world's largest rope manufactory (Plymouth Cordage) to Uncle George's famous woolly horse, from Water Street's ancient wharves and chandleries to the storm of 1898, and from Pres. Warren G. Harding's tercentenary visit to Richard Nixon's welcome of the Mayflower II in 1957, the best of the town's visual history is gathered in Plymouth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439628348
    Plymouth
    Author

    James W. Baker

    James W. Baker is a Plymouth native who lives with his wife, Peggy, in his great-great-grandfather's house at Jabez Corner. Formerly research director at Plimoth Plantation, his interest in Plymouth transcends the Pilgrims to embrace the entire history of the old colony town.

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      Book preview

      Plymouth - James W. Baker

      much.

      INTRODUCTION

      Plymouth is best known as the Pilgrim Town, where the famous events of 1620 marked the beginning of New England and, by extension, all of British North America. The Pilgrims of Plymouth have long been considered, in the words of Samuel Eliot Morison, the spiritual ancestors of all Americans. This is, of course, patently unfair to Virginia, which was there first in 1607. However, it was Plymouth, not Jamestown, that captured the imagination of the world and is now universally regarded as America’s birthplace.

      Yet, the Pilgrims were only the first among the innumerable immigrants who arrived on these shores. Plymouth was never frozen in the image of its first settlers. When the English American colonies were primarily British in origin, Plymouth was a typical coastal community of the time—homogeneous in population and culture. Nevertheless, the town had ties to the outside world through fishing and shipping and its role as a port of entry. In addition, there had long been a small but vital number of Native American and African American families among the old Yankee clans.

      Plymouth found a pioneering role in the new industrial economy that attracted a new pattern of European immigration. Emigrants from Ireland, Canada, and Germany, seeking work in the new mills along Plymouth’s brooks and shores, transformed the town by the 1850s. At the end of the century, the town benefited again from the second wave of immigration, which brought families from Italy, Portugal, Finland, England, Russia, and even China. The Old Colony town’s demographics, far from being limited to Pilgrim stock, reflected those of the nation at large.

      The 20th century saw no abatement in this cycle of growth and change. By midcentury, the new highway system superceded the railroad and streetcars. It brought an explosion in population, introducing the ex-urban pattern of housing developments and commercial sprawl that became characteristic of the American communities everywhere. Shorn of its mills and with many of its early neighborhoods and woodlands lost through progress and urban renewal, Plymouth was transformed once again. Far from being an isolated tourist attraction with a pure Anglo-American past, Plymouth is uniquely representative of the entire American experience, from its Colonial roots to today’s postindustrial society.

      As with most New England towns, the earliest scenes are now beyond recall. We have no pictures of our Pilgrim beginnings or any image at all before the start of the 19th century, when English traveler John Lambert first depicted the town from the harbor entrance. It was the invention of photography that made it feasible to fully record the passing of the old and the advent of the new. Plymouth made good use of this medium to rescue the past from oblivion. We are beneficiaries of enterprising photographers, such as W.S. Robbins, J.C. Barnes, and E.P. McLaughlin, as well as many anonymous camera carriers. We are in debt, too, to the town’s premier publicist and souvenir purveyor, Alfred S. Burbank, whose enthusiasm for Plymouth was not limited to the Pilgrims but also included the contemporary town as well.

      This book is a family album of America’s Home Town, a pictorial retrospective of the people and places from Plymouth’s past two centuries of existence. These images are largely those that no longer exist—except in memory. They show how the town evolved from a rural fishing village to the post–World War II community in which many contemporary Plymoutheans grew up. The pictures date primarily from the 1890s to the 1950s and depict a Plymouth that was still an independent, self-contained community with a population of one third or less of what it is today.

      The first chapter focuses on Plymouth’s historic houses as they looked before they were restored or destroyed. These dwellings, presented in roughly chronological order, hearkened back to Pilgrim times and, like Plymouth Rock or Pilgrim Hall’s artifacts, acted as tangible touchstones to an authentic Plymouth past.

      The second chapter encompasses Plymouth’s vanished industrial landscape when the town was dominated by its mills and factories during the 19th century. Manufacturers used the waterpower of Town Brook, Eel River, and even Hobs Hole Brook to produce ironware, tacks, rope, cotton, and woolen cloth. They ranged in size from Ichabod Morton’s quaint gristmill to the massive Plymouth Cordage Company, which single-handedly created the North Plymouth community.

      The third chapter presents the local stores and businesses that supported the people who worked and lived in Plymouth. It evokes the closeness of a community where everything from hardware to clothing could be found in downtown stores, and there were corner

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