Visits to the Plymouth Plantation and a replica of the Mayflower made for another relaxing day of experiencing American history. Before our trip we studied three major periods: the settlement, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. Along with our stop at Jamestown, today fulfilled our study of the pioneer settlers of America.
Plymouth Plantation is a re-creation of the original colony, with a section devoted to the Indians Native Americans Native Peoples and a section for the Pilgrims. In the first part, we learned from an old woman making clothes, watched a young man building a house, and listened to the fellow below describe how he makes canoes by burning out the inside of a log.
A descendant of the Wampanoags spends a couple of months making a canoe.
Jonathan got to see some of the toys that were made by the Native Peoples.
The Pilgrim Village was much larger and had even more characters. I think rather than a two-hour visit, I’d prefer to live there for a month and do things the way they did. It’s difficult to jump into and out of the shoes of another time period so quickly.
The family walks up the main street of Plymouth Plantation.
Cute.
The boat that brought the first pilgrims to Plymouth in 1620 was probably scrapped a few years later, but in the 1950s an exact replica of the Mayflower was made and sailed to America from England. Now it is open to tourists.
The kids and the Mayflower II
Travelers on that first ship had to build their own “bedrooms” (if they could afford it) and this is an example of how some might have slept. It does seem like we could do some furniture re-arrangement at our house and free up one of the bedrooms for an expansion of my library.
Kids testing out the accommodations on the Mayflower II.
The boys and I are currently reading Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and it provides a lot of detail into the earliest days of the settlers and Indians in Massachusetts.
I know you’re schedule must be packed, but you would enjoy an hour at the Semetic Museum at Harvard.
Al – yes, thanks. We’ll be there tomorrow.
Glad you’re still enjoying New England! I’ll add a second to Philbrick’s book, “Mayflower”. My mother-in-law had three relatives on the ship. John Howland is the best known of them. You probably saw the replica of his house. His son’s home is the oldest standing home in Plymouth. [John Howland has TONS of descendents living in New England, btw. Prolific family.]