Plymouth County, Massachusetts
I’m writing about Plymouth County, Massachusetts, this week even though it’s not the next county alphabetically. Today is Thanksgiving and I think it’s appropriate, despite my essay from yesterday where I argued that the Pilgrims were irrelevant to Thanksgiving.
Working on this project has taught me a lot about American history – history at the granular level, history as it was lived by the people at the time. When I wrote about my first Massachusetts County – Barnstable County, in Week 3 of this project – I took a deep dive into the early history of Massachusetts, and soon realized how much I needed to learn. The following map helped me understand some basics of early Massachusetts history.
For this essay, I had to come to terms with three major evolutions of the Plymouth area of Massachusetts. The town of Plymouth, the Plymouth Colony, and Plymouth County are three different entities, and I had to figure out which one I needed to research to find out what I needed to know.
The towns are fairly easy to understand. They predated both the official organization of the Plymouth Colony (1643) and the County of Plymouth (1685), so they provide the organizational framework for my discussion of this county. One of the many problems involved in researching these early years in Massachusetts is the uncertainty about where records may be located; I have to look in records for the town, colony, county, and state to make sure that I’m exhausting all possibilities.
I’m going to talk only about the town of Plymouth in this essay; this chart identifies all of the towns that are relevant to my family, along with the dates of their settlement and incorporation.
Impact of Boundary Changes on Plymouth County
As the following maps show, after 1707 little changed in the configuration of the boundaries of Plymouth County. My ancestors were no longer in Plymouth after this time, so I’m not going to focus on this issue for this essay. (These maps are all taken from https://www.mapofus.org)
It hardly seems necessary to talk about the town of Plymouth. Famously the final landing site of the first voyage of the Mayflower, Plymouth was established in December 1620 by English separatist Puritans (Pilgrims) after first anchoring in the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts, on November 11, 1620. This was not the intended destination for this ship; it was headed for the mouth of the Hudson River near the Dutch colony of Manhattan, which was also claimed by the Colony of Virginia at the time. The voyage was long, the ship went off course, and once the weary travelers had landed, they decided to stay.
The Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth had an extended history as a community. Many of them had first left England in 1607 to go to Amsterdam and then to Leyden in Holland, seeking religious freedom. They found religious freedom there, but also found it hard to make a living and even harder to maintain their English identity. In 1619, they sought investors to help fund their trip to the New World. As they were planning their trip, they realized that they didn’t have enough people to successfully build the colony, so they recruited outsiders to join them. The list of Mayflower passengers is divided between Saints (Pilgrims) and Strangers (non-Pilgrims). Of the 102 passengers, 40 were Pilgrims and the rest were comparatively secular Strangers.
Originally the Mayflower had a companion ship, the Speedwell. This ship was poorly named; almost immediately after leaving Southampton, England, the Speedwell began to leak, and both ships headed back to port in Plymouth. Travelers from both ships squeezed themselves and their belongings onto the Mayflower, and they set sail once again. Because of the delay, the Mayflower had to cross the Atlantic at the height of the storm season, resulting in a horribly unpleasant journey. It took the ship 66 days to cross the Atlantic; the passengers soon discovered, however, that they were in the wrong place, and technically had no right to be there at all.
What follows is an extraction of how Wikipedia tells the story of the settlement of Plymouth.
Realizing that they did not have the legal right to settle in the Cape Cod area, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact before they left the ship, establishing the procedures by which they would govern themselves in the absence of other governing authority.
Plymouth faced many difficulties during its first winter, the most notable being the risk of starvation and the lack of suitable shelter. From the beginning, the assistance of Native Americans was vital. According to historian and sociologist James W. Loewen in his 1995 book “Lies My Teacher Taught Me,” one colonist's journal reports:
“We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ... In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It is with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us.”
Loewen doesn’t tell us who this colonist was, and everyone who repeats this quote cites Loewen rather than the “one colonist” who actually wrote this.
The Wikipedia account continues:
During their earlier exploration of the Cape, the Pilgrims had come upon a Native American burial site which contained corn, and they had taken the corn for future planting. On another occasion, they found an unoccupied house and had taken corn and beans, for which they made restitution with the occupants about six months later. Even greater assistance came from Samoset and Tisquantum (known as Squanto by the pilgrims), a Native American sent by Wampanoag Tribe Chief Massasoit as an ambassador and technical adviser. Squanto had been kidnapped in 1614 by an English slave raider and sold in Málaga, Spain. He learned English, escaped slavery, and returned home in 1619. He taught the colonists how to farm corn, where and how to catch fish, and other helpful skills for the New World. He also was instrumental in the survival of the settlement for the first two years. Even with this help, however, almost half of the colonists died during the first winter, due to a combination of disease and starvation. In his diary Of Plymouth Plantation, the colony’s leader William Bradford described the first winter this way:
“But that what was most sad and lamentable was, that in two or three months’ time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of the winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and their inaccommodate condition had brought upon them. So there died some times two or three of a day in the foresaid time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained.”
Squanto and another guide sent by Massasoit in 1621 helped the colonists set up trading posts for furs. Chief Massasoit later formed a Peace Treaty with the Pilgrims. Upon growing a plentiful harvest in the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims gathered with Squanto, Samoset, Massasoit, and ninety other Wampanoag men in a celebration of thanksgiving to God for their plentiful harvest. This celebration is known today as the First Thanksgiving, and is still commemorated annually in downtown Plymouth with a parade and a reenactment. Since 1941, Thanksgiving has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States.
Plymouth served as the capital of Plymouth Colony (which consisted of modern-day Barnstable, Bristol, and Plymouth Counties) from its founding in 1620 until 1691, when the colony was merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other territories to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Plymouth holds the distinction of being the first permanent settlement in New England, and one of the oldest settlements in the United States.
Plymouth’s early years of self-government are well documented. Under the Mayflower Compact, the Puritan Separatists (Pilgrims), although a minority in the group of settlers, were to have total control over the colony’s government during its first 40 years of existence. As leader of the Puritans congregation, William Bradford was chosen to serve as Plymouth’s governor for 30 years after its founding.
My Ancestors in Plymouth
I have several sets of ancestors who lived in the town of Plymouth; I’ll talk about each set in turn below.
Rebecca Freeman had an illustrious heritage in Plymouth. One of her maternal great-grandfathers, William Brewster IV (1566-1644), was the spiritual leader of the passengers on the Mayflower; another maternal great-grandfather, Thomas Prence (1574-1630), didn’t arrive in Plymouth until 1621, but he soon married William Brewster’s daughter Patience Brewster (1600-1634). Rebecca’s maternal grandfather, Edmund Freeman (1596-1682), was a real latecomer to Plymouth, arriving in 1635. However, by 1640, he was chosen Assistant Governor to William Bradford. In 1637, he was instrumental in founding the town of Sandwich, which was later in Barnstable County, not Plymouth.
Mary Cooke was descended from two passengers on the Mayflower – her grandfathers Francis Cooke (1583-1663) and Richard Warren (1578-1628). I’ll talk about each of them below.
My 10th great-grandfather Francis Cooke was living in Leyden as early as 1603, when he married Hester Mahieu (1582-1666), a protestant Walloon whose family had fled to Canterbury in England because of religious persecution in Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). Francis was identified as a “woolcomber”, and he and Hester did not immediately identify with the Separatists in Leyden, affiliating instead with the Leyden Walloon congregation. Francis and Hester had six children who survived infancy, including my 9th great-grandfather Jean (or John) Cooke (1607-1695), who was their second child. Five of their children were born in Leyden, and their youngest child was born in Plymouth.
John accompanied his father Francis on the trip on the Mayflower; they were originally passengers on the Speedwell, but after that ship’s difficulties they boarded the Mayflower. Hester and the younger children followed on the Anne in 1623. Francis was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, signed as the ship lay at anchor off what would become Provincetown.
Francis was active in Plymouth affairs in the 1630s and 1640s, serving on committees to lay out land grants and highways, petit jury, grand jury, and coroner's jury. He appears on the 1643 Plymouth list of those able to bear arms. At some point in 1638 or afterward, he settled at Rocky Nook on the Jones River, within the limits of Kingston, a few miles from Plymouth itself.
My 9th great-grandfather John Cooke married Sarah Warren (1614-1686) in 1631. Sarah’s father Richard Warren (1578-1628) had also been on the Mayflower. Sarah had come to Plymouth with her mother Elizabeth (I don’t know her last name) and siblings on the Anne in 1623. Richard was a London Merchant, not a religious member of the Mayflower assemblage; in the parlance of Plymouth, he was a “stranger,” not a “saint,” who became associated with the Pilgrims through the Merchant Adventurers in London. He was not in Leyden, but joined the migrants in Southampton, England.
Richard died in 1628, shortly after the 1627 Division of Lands and Cattle. Elizabeth never remarried; however, all seven of their children grew to adulthood and had children, establishing Richard Warren as the Mayflower passenger with the largest number of descendants, including President Ulysses S. Grant, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, astronaut Alan Shepard, author Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie series), actor Richard Gere, Lavinia Warren, also known as Mrs. Tom Thumb, educator and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Wright brothers, and . . . me.
Sarah married John Cooke (as I mentioned above), and they had six children, including my 8th great-grandmother Mary Cooke (1647-1715), whose story started this section of my essay. By the time Mary married Philip Taber (1646-1693) in 1667, they were living in Dartmouth, Bristol County, Massachusetts.
Elizabeth Mitchell is also the granddaughter of a passenger on the Mayflower – and if the names on the bottom right of the chart look familiar, that’s because I just wrote about them. The previous section focused on the family of John Cooke, the oldest son of Francis. But I am also descended from his daughter, Jane Cooke (1604-1640), who came to Plymouth with her mother and siblings on the Anne in 1623. It’s interesting to me that I am descended from Francis Cooke through both my paternal grandparents – my paternal grandmother Orpha Lydia Ellefritz is descended from John Cooke, while my paternal grandfather John Cecil Arnold is descended from Jane Cooke. This means that my paternal grandparents were 8th cousins twice removed. One oddity of this is that Francis Cooke (father of both John and Jane) is my 12th great-grandfather through Jane but only my 10th great-grandfather through John. The generations moved at different rates over the centuries.
Jane married Experience Mitchell (1602-1685) (gotta love those Puritan names) in 1627. Experience Mitchell’s parents were Thomas Mitchell (1566-after 1622) and Margaret Williams (1568-1628), who married in Amsterdam in 1606. They had three children, including Experience, who apparently came to Massachusetts on the Anne in 1623 as well. His parents did not leave Amsterdam. Experience was granted a parcel of eight acres in the division of land for those who came over on the Anne in 1623, and he became a Freeman by 1633. He served on juries and was a surveyor of highways.
So interesting to read about towns in the area where I live. I am quite familiar with all those on the map, although I live in Weymouth and taught in Cohasset, both in Norfolk county. 🙂