The 1627 Pilgrim Village

The 1627 Pilgrim Village

Plimoth Plantation’s Pilgrim Village brings to life the Plymouth of 1627. This year was selected because it is well-documented and represents the village just before the colonists began to disperse beyond the first settlement. The March 22 Cattle Division (the first step in the agreed-upon division of property among the colonists) gives us a census of the settlement, and the thorough description by Isaack DeRasieres of New Amsterdam after his visit in October provides many welcome details about early Plymouth. Seven years after the arrival of the Mayflower, "The Streete" rises westward from Plymouth Harbor to the Fort/Meetinghouse on the hill. It replicates the original site of the Plymouth settlement, which is today Leyden Street in downtown Plymouth. Most of the houses are located on either side of this street. Crossing near the center of the Street is the "Highway" which runs north and south to the cornfields. In today’s 1627 Pilgrim Village, the houses on the north side of the Street (from the east end) represent the homes of the Palmer (previously Soule), Annable, Fuller, Howland, Hopkins, Bradford, Alden and Standish families. On the south side are storehouses, the common house, and the Browne, Brewster, Billington, Allerton, Cooke and Winslow houses. There were originally additional households (as is evident from the Cattle Division and Isaack DeRasieres' mention of about 50 families) that are not represented in the exhibit, as the location of many of the households is unknown. Community structures such as the cow house, hay house and outdoor oven are found throughout the village.

The Fort/Meetinghouse dominates the hillside on which the village is located. It is a timber-framed blockhouse, with a ground floor meeting area and an upper gundeck overlooking the surrounding landscape. Enclosing both the Fort/Meetinghouse and the village is a palisade, a defensive barrier made of split or riven logs with bulwarks and gates at the corners. The colony built these defenses in 1622 upon news of the massacre of colonists in Virginia. The fortification was intended to protect the town from assault by the Indian nations or England’s French and Spanish enemies. Fortunately, attack never came, and the Fort/Meetinghouse was used as a meeting place for religious services and as a courthouse for the colony’s legislative and judicial affairs.

Gazing eastward from the Fort/Meetinghouse visitors are struck by the dramatic vista, in which the earthy tones of the village are set off against the deep blue of Cape Cod Bay. The double row of thatched and clapboarded houses reflect the vernacular building tradition of rural England and the colonists’ varied backgrounds. They range in type from hovels—simple A-frame temporary dwellings—to more substantial structures an early visitor to Plymouth Colony described as "very fair and pleasant."

Each house contains painstakingly accurate reproductions of the furniture, tools, and cooking equipment representing the material possessions listed in Plymouth probate inventories. They are not just for display, but are used by the museum staff to re-create the daily life of the colony. The activities of the settlement, all appropriate to the changing seasons, are carried out in the correct seventeenth-century manner. The 1627 Plantation was above all a farming community, and the working day for today’s "villagers" is largely taken up by agricultural or foodways tasks. However, life in Plymouth Colony was not all work and no play. Special times such as births, weddings, militia musters and successful harvests gathered the community for socializing, feasting and even games.

Clothed in period fashions and speaking in the accents of their character’s place of origin, museum staff—"interpreters"—take on the identities of the original inhabitants of the colony. Together, these "first person" roles replicate the social and cultural life of a real human community. The housewife’s primary daily responsibility was feeding and caring for her household. The primary occupation of Plymouth men was farming, although many had training in trades such as coopering or blacksmithing which became part-time occupations. The village shelters seventeenth-century breeds of cattle, goats, sheep, swine and poultry, many of which are quite rare today. Outside the palisade are fields which produce the crops that were the Pilgrims’ major source of food. Adjacent to each house are kitchen gardens for both food and medicine.