Plymouth Rock's American Symbolism Exceeds Its Appearance

the story of

plymouth

rock

is they pulled their boat right next to that

rock

in 1620 they got off the boat they got on the rock they got off the rock they got on the beach whether or not it happened its hard to say of course i think they used it as a landmark when they came ashore instead of stepping on it, but that's the story, so they landed here in 1620. They wintered. It is a very hard winter. About half of the people are dead. at the end of the first winter they spend the summer and one of the common things in this period is that once you have the harvest, you have a bit of a celebration, the hard work is done, you have all the food coming in and you want to eat some of the food essentially for them to have that celebration and Massasoit shows up with about 90 of the weird people bringing five deer there are a lot of things on the menu some of them we would I recognize some of them not the deer or certainly on the menu there will be poultry of some sort type on the menu it's more likely duck than turkey but turkeys are certainly a possibility without cranberries they still don't have they don't have sugar to sweeten them but that first Thanksgiving would have taken place at five hundred or thousand feet from where we're standing right now the real importance of the rock doesn't matter how big it is and it doesn't matter if they stepped on it or not because the real importance of the rock is that rock as a symbol and people have to decide for themselves what Plymouth Rock means to them and when people leave here, our goal is for people to look at the rock as not just a rock. but looking at it symbolically