Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony (sometimes spelled Plimouth) was the first permanent English colony in New England from 1620 and the third permanent English colony in America, after Newfoundland and the Jamestown Colony. It was settled by the passengers on the Mayflower at a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement served as the capital of the colony and developed as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of what is now the southeastern portion of Massachusetts. Many of the people and events surrounding Plymouth Colony have become part of American folklore, including the American tradition of Thanksgiving and the monument of Plymouth Rock.
Plymouth Colony was founded by a group of Protestant Separatists initially known as the Brownist Emigration, who came to be known as the Pilgrims or Pilgrim Fathers.
Quotes
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- Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil,
Began the kingdom not of kings, but men:
Began the making of the world again.
Here centuries sank, and from the hither brink
A new world reached and raised an old-world link,
When English hands, by wider vision taught,
Threw down the feudal bars the Normans brought,
And here revived, in spite of sword and stake,
Their ancient freedom of the Wapentake!
Here struck the seed—the Pilgrims' roofless town,
Where equal rights and equal bonds were set,
Where all the people equal-franchised met;
Where doom was writ of privilege and crown;
Where human breath blew all the idols down;
Where crests were nought, where vulture flags were furled,
And common men began to own the world.- John Boyle O'Reilly, "The Pilgrim Fathers", st. 10 — J. J. Roche (ed.) Life, Poems and Speeches (1891), p. 400
External links
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- The Proceedings at the Celebration by the Pilgrim Society, at Plymouth, August 1st, 1889, of the Completion of the National Monument to the Pilgrims (Plymouth: Avery & Doten, 1889), p. 107