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Myles Standish and the Lost Colony of Massachusetts

In March 1623, leaders of the struggling Plymouth Plantation dispatched their paid military leader Myles Standish to a coastal settlement 25 miles north. They gave him a savage mandate: return with the head of a troublesome warrior named Wituwamat.

Wituwamat was the perceived leader of a rumored multi-tribal strike against a failed English trading post and possibly Plymouth itself.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

With a handful of men and a Native ally named Hobbamock, Myles Standish ambushed Wituwamat, a powerful brave named Pecksuot and two other Natives in a locked room. He then engaged in a running battle with another group of warriors in present-day Weymouth, Mass. A few others joined them–members of the trading colony established a year earlier by London investor Thomas Weston. Weston and his Merchant Adventurer partners wanted to capitalize on the profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

A few days later, Standish proudly impaled Wituwamat’s head on the stockade at the entrance to Plymouth Plantation—a stark warning to the local Native populations.

It was an important moment in American history–although largely forgotten. The attack clearly established the primacy of the Pilgrims. Today, the event—and the actual physical reminders of it—are being examined and reinterpreted by historians, archaeologists and descendants of the original actors.

Myles Standish, Condemned

The local tribes that had quarreled with the new English settlers quickly dissipated, clearing the way for a massive Puritan migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony anchored at Boston. The Natives feared the Pilgrims’ guns, their ruthlessness, and their rumored ability to unleash a deadly plague on command. Yet the violent preemptive strike was condemned even by the Pilgrims’ own spiritual leader, John Robinson, who had remained at their safe haven in Holland.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

The necessity of the strike is still debated. America prefers to remember the banquet between the Pilgrims and the local Natives, formally proclaimed as Thanksgiving by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. There was indeed a feast, albeit a strained affair, between the Pilgrims and a group of Natives, called the Pokanoket Wampanoags, who had sought a military alliance to stave off possible annihilation by the rival Narragansett tribe.

How It All Started

The story of how tensions escalated to the murder and decapitation of Wituwamat begins with the arrival of the first Europeans in present-day Massachusetts. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown fame explored the region in 1614 with several vessels. One of his commanders, Thomas Hunt, captured several Natives to sell as slaves. That action negatively impacted English and Native relations for years to come, in Smith’s view.

One of the captured natives, a brave named Squanto, later returned. The first Europeans spread infectious diseases that obliterated some coastal populations. Disease wiped out a village called Patuxet, once Squanto’s home.

In 1615, the Natives took revenge on a wrecked French ship, killing most of the sailors and keeping a few as slaves. One of the Natives participating in the butchery was Pecksuot. He later taunted Weston colonists and Standish with his gruesome account. Later, sailors of an English ship reportedly murdered several members of the Wampanoags. They then responded by attacking a party led by an explorer and gold prospector named Thomas Dermer.

Treaty

In his best-selling book titled Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote: “When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims did little to change that assumption.”

A Pilgrim landing party raided a buried supply of corn seed, ripped through a gravesite and fled from the beach under a hail of arrows. The scouting party, sailing up the coast, found a spot with a harbor, fresh water and a hill for a fort. They then started to build homes.

The settlement at Plymouth had inadequate provisions, and 52 of the 102 who arrived on Cape Cod died by spring. Squanto, who had learned to speak English, befriended the Pilgrims. He then helped establish a treaty with Massasoit Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoags.

But Corbitant, sachem of the Pocasset tribe of the Wampanoag, challenged Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims. The treaty seemed like a straightforward military alliance. However, it actually undercut long-standing tribal legal tradition, according to Paula Peters, a present-day activist for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by Hobbamock.

The Pilgrims dispatched Myles Standish to a village called Nemasket with less than a dozen men. His mission: to kill and behead Corbitant, who escaped. Later, the Narragansetts, also unhappy with the Pilgrims, sent Plymouth Plantation a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin, a threat. Standish ordered construction of a palisade fence surrounding their homes, and beefed up other fortifications.

Unhappy Investor

Meanwhile, the Pilgrims were struggling to feed themselves, let alone return a profit to the London investment group that paid their way. The initial plan to farm communally failed completely. Only 26 acres were planted in 1621. In 1623, each family received permission to plant privately, with the amount of land determined by family size.

“The Pilgrims, in their quest to be stepping-stones for freedom, had almost everything go wrong as they attempted to plant a colony in the new world. By the time they reached the shores of New England, they were poor, had barely enough provisions for the first winter and began to die at an alarming rate,” wrote Dr. Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

The Mayflower

The Mayflower returned to London in 1621 empty of cargo. Weston was not happy. A return ship carried this message to Plymouth Gov. William Bradford: “The life of the business depends upon the lading of this ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter (the Fortune), I promise you I will never quit the business.”

Wessagusset

Despite his commitment, Weston bailed on the Plymouth investment. Instead, he created another venture: a trading colony of some 60 men. No religious separatists this time. No women. And no children. Just men, albeit a rough group, who would engage in profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

His traders arrived at Plymouth in the fall of 1622 poorly provisioned and not prepared to establish a settlement. They left for an area on the coast that the Natives called Wessaguscus, and they called Wessagusset.

They were greeted by the local sachem Aberdikes, who welcomed the idea of trade. But the situation soon deteriorated. The alert of an emerging crisis came from a man named Phineas Pratt, a member of the Weston Colony at Wessagusset. He chronicled his story in 1664, when he petitioned the colonial government for the financial benefits accorded “First Comers.”

He was the only first-person witness to make a written record. But he was not present for the battle. That account comes from Edward Winslow of Plymouth Plantation in a detailed report to London titled Good Newes From New England. Details were also provided in accounts from Bradford (Of Plymouth Plantation) and Thomas Morton (New English Canaan). Winslow was the de facto agent with Massasoit as well as with the investors who had funded the Pilgrims trip.

Phineas Pratt’s Account

The account of Phineas Pratt went like this: When the Weston party of 60 men arrived at Wessagusset in 1622 “there was a great plague among the savages &, as themselves told us, half their people died thereof…The savages seemed to be good friends with us while they feared us, but when they saw famine prevail, they began to insult.”

Gravestone of Phineas Pratt in Charlestown, Mass.

Pecksuot sought to intimidate the newcomers with boasts of how the tribe had subdued the shipwrecked French crew. “We made them our servants. They wept much…We took away their clothes. They lived but a little while.”

Aberdikes, the local sachem, later approached the colony with several armed braves and accused one of the men of stealing corn. They retreated when they saw men armed with muskets behind a fence palisade surrounding the fort and houses.

According to legend, the Weston colonists hanged a proxy for the crime, an older man who was deathly ill.

The colonists then buttoned up the palisade and consumed what food they had left while braves watched.

‘Tomorrow I will go’

Pratt continued: “When we understood that their plot was to kill all English people in one day when the snow was gone, I would have sent a man to Plymouth, but none were willing to go. Then I said if Plymouth men know not of this treacherous plot, they & we are all dead men; therefore, if God willing, tomorrow I will go.”

Pratt made a successful escape to Plymouth, where he found preparations already under way for a military expedition to Wessagusset.

Edward Winslow

Edward Winslow had just arrived after a healing mission to Massasoit, who told of a multi-tribal plan to attack Plymouth and the Weston Colony. Spurred by the warning of Massasoit and later confirmed by Pratt, the Pilgrims sent Myles Standish to ambush the tribal leaders.

Myles Standish Battles the Natives

Standish and his men took a small vessel called a shallop and arrived at Wessagusset where the colonist ship, the Swan, lay anchored. No one was on board, and Standish fired a musket. Several men suddenly appeared.

Surprised to find Myles Standish, they said there was no imminent threat from the tribe. In fact, many of the colonists were cohabitating with them.

Standish collected colonists in a hilltop stockade and told them of his plan to lure Natives inside and then kill them. The Natives perceived the threat and only Wituwamat, Pecksuot and two other men ventured into the fort.

Myles Standish promised them a feast and invited them into a house. He then locked the door, grabbed Pecksuot’s knife and killed him. Then his other soldiers killed and decapitated Wituwamat. They hanged a third brave.

The George Soule house at Plimoth Patuxet, probably similar to the house where Myles Standish killed Wituwamat and three other Natives.

Aberdikes approached with warriors, and the conflict debouched into a running battle in the surrounding area. The Natives, outgunned, disappeared into the tall cattails of a marsh. At the end of the day, seven Natives were killed. No English died in combat.

The settlement was evacuated, with most colonists sailing the Swan to a fishing outpost in Maine. Most of the local tribes pulled up stakes and fled the area, fearing another attack.

Aftermath

Bradford lamented the lost ability to profit from further beaver fur trade— at least for a while. The events were later mythologized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1858 narrative poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Samuel Butler recalled the proxy hanging in his satirical poem titled “Hudibras” published in the mid-17th century.

The peace that prevailed in the area was short lived. Massasoit’s son Metacom planned to continue friendly relations with the English and took the name of Philip. But tensions over land use and diminished game erupted in the 1670s, leading to an armed conflict called King Philip’s War. Colonial militia overwhelmed the tribal coalition, and there was slaughter on both sides. Metacom was killed by militia in 1676.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

Today

The tribes have a modest presence in Massachusetts today. The Wampanoags, led in part by Paula Peters, made a (so far) failed bid for a federal casino license.

The Massachusetts tribe is greatly diminished, but one group still holds tribal meetings at Ponkapoag near their ancestral home in the Blue Hills area south of Boston. Many were segregated in areas such as “Indian Row” in Brockton, Mass. In the 2010 census, just 85 people identified as Ponkapoag Massachusetts.

Tensions between the tribal groups continue to this day. Ren Green, one of the sachems, or leaders, of the Ponkapoag Massachusetts, confronted Paula Peters of the Wampanoags in a standing room only meeting at the Weymouth Public Library in 2017. There, Peters claimed the Wampanoags’ territory had included the Blue Hills area of Boston. Green called it an attempt to claim the Boston area site for a casino. Peters called it a misunderstanding.

Today, on some days, you can talk to an historical actor portraying Phineas Pratt at Plimoth Patuxet, the name of the well-done tourist site recreating the Plymouth Colony and a nearby Wampanoag site.

Wigwam and Wampanoag guide at Plimoth Patuxet

The Reincarnation of Phineas Pratt

On a sunny spring day, I found a youthful Pratt working a field at the bottom of a hill. He was surprised and excited that someone wanted to speak with him. He was particularly surprised that I lived in Wessagusset, which is still dealing with its odd place in history.

Yes, he told me, he had arrived at Plymouth from Wessagusset. Yes, Standish had spiked Wituwamat’s head and stank in the sun. And yes, he had escaped the troubles and alerted the colonists.

The Plymouth settlement is commemorated at Plymouth Patuxet and at historical sites in the town of Plymouth. A recent high-tech archaeological dig by faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus identified the site of a palisade wall near the fort that protected the settlement.

Finding the Lost Weston Colony

The Weston Colony site is another matter. It had rapidly disintegrated after Myles Standish and his soldiers departed on their shallop. Per local tradition in the mid-19th century, the site was located near a freshwater creek feeding into a cove on what today is called the Fore River.

John Winthrop commissioned this map showing three structures near Hunt’s Hill with the word “Wessaguscus.” Henry F. Waters “discovered” the map in the British Museum and sent photos to the Boston Public Library.

In 1884, a map created in 1633 or 1634 by Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to light in the British Museum. It showed three structures next to a cove where the Fore River opens to a large bay today called Hingham Bay.

Historian Charles Francis Adams did a deep dive into the subject in the 1880s. He armed himself with the Winthrop map, a few descriptions of the topography in the Phineas Pratt account and a dollop of common sense.

Hunt’s Hill

Adams figured the Weston fort was best located on a hill that offered views of the bay and the mouth of the river. It also needed a freshwater source. There was a hill on a hook of land jutting into a cove next to the houses on the Winthrop map. And there was a spring and a swamp nearby that could have been the one mentioned by Pratt.

Adams was convinced this site, called Hunt’s Hill, was the location of the Weston Colony. His logic remains to this day the generally accepted wisdom.

The most widely accepted location for the Weston Colony: a hilly peninsula that extended into a cove near the mouth of the Fore River. The hill was removed in the 1890s for fill used to create the South Boston Marine Terminal. A private dock is on the site today. This photo was taken from King’s Cove Park, adjacent to the controversial Weymouth compressor station.

But Wait…

In the early 1890s, a salvage company needed fill for a large marine park under construction in South Boston. The hill on the cove was for sale. Adams strenuously objected, but the hill was sold with no effort at archaeological excavation.

Today a group called the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project is having second thoughts about the Hunt’s Hill site. Its director, an archaeologist named Craig Chartier, says the Winthrop map could have identified buildings put up after the Weston Colony was abandoned. He identifies four other sites in the immediate area that are possibilities. One is particularly interesting. Two sets of bodies were dug up in graves either in or adjacent to that site. It meets the key criteria: hilltop, ocean frontage, freshwater access and a nearby swamp, as described by Phineas Pratt.

A Weymouth historian named G. Stinson Lord reported in a commemorative book in 1972 on the discovery of seven bodies at one gravesite and two decapitated bodies in another.

Stories That Need To Be Told or Retold

Today, there is a strong feeling that the stories of Native Americans in the area need to be better represented. For example, the living history exhibit at Plymouth dropped the word “Plantation” in 2020 and replaced it with the word “Patuxet.” And it made plans to improve the adjacent Wampanoag site.

The Massachusetts state seal depicts the arm of Myles Standish brandishing a saber above the head of a Native American standing at peace. Courtesy Doug Smock.

The Massachusetts state seal incorporates an image of Myles Standish’s arm brandishing a sword. It hovers above a Native American with arrows pointed downward. In January an appointed commission set about developing a new state seal. In 1999, Weymouth Town Meeting voted to purchase a tract of land in Wessagusset for conservation and historical purposes. A memorial garden built with private funds raised by local resident Jodi Purdy, a descendent of Myles Standish, commemorates Massachusetts Natives killed or displaced by the colonists.

Descendants of John Saunders, the second governor of the Weston Colony, then installed another memorial.

Descendants of John Saunders, second governor of the Weston Colony, received permission from the Weymouth Historical Commission to place a commemorative marker in Wessagusset Park in 2004.

Peace, Finally?

I started an effort two years ago to place a town historical marker at the park. The town approved the proposal, but then shelved it due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Weymouth Town Meeting approved purchase of Wessagusset land in 1999 to create a park that would recognize the nearby site of the Weston Colony. Myles Standish descendent Jodi Purdy led efforts to buy the land and build a memorial garden in hopes the Weston colonists and Massachusetts tribe “have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

One of the Native American memorials in the park reads: “On Oct. 21, 2001, these puddingstone memorials were dedicated as symbols of hope that the souls of the first inhabitants of Wessagusset, the Massachusett Indians, and the first settlers of Weymouth, the Weston colonists, have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

The author of this story, Doug Smock, is a retired newspaper reporter and magazine editor who has always loved history, particularly forgotten yet important events. His next project is “Young George Washington and the Battle of Braddock”. He is the coauthor of two business books, including “Straight to the Bottom Line”. Smock has lived in the Wessagusset neighborhood of Weymouth for the past eight years. He will present his Myles Standish story to a class at UMass Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Images: Wampanoag wigwam and guide By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002766; Edward Soule house By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002664. Phineas Pratt gravestone By Darcyjae – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74569178. Wessagusset map: Lauren Chen, reference librarian, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Images of park, Hunt’s Hill, Saunders memorial and state seal courtesy Doug Smock.

This story updated in 2023.

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Six Stops From the People’s Guide to Greater Boston

One of our favorite books is the People’s Guide to Greater Boston, a tour guide that goes beyond the usual listing of tourist attractions.

The authors — Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis — take readers to sites of “oppression, resistance, organization or transformation.” Stops include the homes of wealthy opium smugglers, slaveowners, mill owners and imperialists.

People’s Guide

Published by University of California Press People’s Guides series, it also presents themed tours, such as a One Percent Tour of Greater Boston, a Malcolm and Martin Tour and a Sacco and Vanzetti Tour.

The Elias Hasket Derby House.

The One Percent Tour, for example, features the home of the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, the home of 18th-century millionaire Elias Hasket Derby in Salem and Elmwood, where British lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver lived in Cambridge.

To give you an idea of the places to which the book takes the reader, we bring you six stops from the People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

1. Noah Worcester House, Brighton

Marker for Noah Worcester house between these triple-deckers. image courtesy @ 2021 Google

The U.S. Postal Department erected a small monument between 437 and 439 Washington St. in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. It looks like a headstone, but it marks the home of Noah Worcester, Brighton’s first postmaster.

Worcester was more than a postmaster, however. He worked as a writer, a minister and a pioneer in the American peace movement.

Born in Hollis, N.H., in 1758, he marched to Boston with his father’s militia company at 16. He narrowly escaped imprisonment during the Battle of Bunker Hill. He later fought in the Battle of Bennington. The carnage he saw on the battlefield helped persuade him to give peace a chance.

Worcester married, had children and entered the Unitarian ministry in New Hampshire. He published arguments defending the Unitarian creed, which brought him to the attention of prominent clergymen William Ellery Channing and John Lowell. They invited him to come to Boston to edit a new publication, The Christian Disciple. He accepted, and then he started the Massachusetts Peace Society.

In 1814, he wrote a treatise, A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, considered a classic of antiwar writing. He also received an appointment as Brighton’s postmaster, but his daughter Sally apparently did all the work.

Channing, in a tribute to him, wrote,

He was struck, as no other man within my acquaintance has been, with the monstrous incongruity between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of Christian communities; between Christ’s teaching of peace, mercy, forgiveness, and the wars which divide and desolate the church and the world.

437-439 Washington St., Brighton

2. Parmenter Street Chapel, North End, Boston

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be here. Image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be across from the North End branch of the Boston Public Library. In its courtyard was a sand garden. Not just any sand garden (we’d call it a sand box) but the sand garden that launched a thousand playgrounds across the country.

It began with a doctor who saw children playing in sand gardens in Berlin’s public parks. She brought the idea back in 1885 to the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, a reformist group of upper-class women. Poor immigrants had flooded into Boston, and the ladies didn’t think the children had enough open space for play. They believed structured, supervised play in and around sand gardens would teach working-class, immigrant children morality and manners. It would also improve health and hygiene and turn the children into good U.S. citizens.

Neighborhood mothers supervised the children at first, but then MEHA hired “matrons” to take over. Within five years they supervised 21 sand gardens in Boston, augmenting the sandbox play by leading singing and dancing. Ten years after the first pile of sand was dumped on Parmenter Street, 39 cities had at least one playground.

The Parmenter Street Chapel is gone, replaced by a large brick building that houses a theater and apartments.

20 Parmenter Street, North End

3. United Fruit Co. Headquarters, Boston

United Fruit’s staff in Jamaica at a time when the company was promoting tourism.

You know it as Chiquita Brands International, now in North Carolina, but it started out on Long Wharf as the Boston Fruit Company in 1870. In 1899, the company merged with its rival, the Tropical Trading and Transport Company. They named themselves the United Fruit Company. From about 1900 to 1903, the multinational also known as ‘the Octopus’ had its headquarters at 60 State St. A plaque marks the site, now a skyscraper.

Within a decade of the merger, United Fruit grew into a banana empire, the largest agricultural enterprise in the world. At its height in the mid-1950s it had 100,000 employees, a fleet of merchant ships and 1,500 miles of railroad in Latin America. It also had few scruples.

60 State St., former home of United Fruit, according to the People’s Guide.

In 1954, United Fruit worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz had had the temerity to redistribute land to the people of Guatemala. United Fruit owned 70 percent of Guatemala’s private land in 1942, according to the People’s Guide. Arbenz’ overthrow led to three decades of military dictatorship and war in which U.S.-backed forces killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

Another legacy of the United Fruit Company: the many Afro-Caribbean immigrants who came to Boston on United Fruit ships.

The company then moved to 131 State Street in 1903, then to 1 Federal Street and finally to 80 Federal Street.

60 State Street, Boston

4. Walter E. Fernald State School, Waltham

The Fernald School, now closed.

Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward’s husband, founded the school in Boston in 1848 to care for people with developmental disabilities. Political correctness hadn’t entered the lexicon yet, so Howe called it the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children.

The school moved to Waltham in 1887 under the leadership of Walter E. Fernald, a proponent of eugenics. Later it took his name. The school began to conduct scientific experiments, and to take children who had no developmental disabilities. They just came from poor families.

In 1946, the school started The Science Club, run by scientists from MIT. They enticed boys to join the club with promises of trips to the beach, Red Sox games and gifts. The boys ate a special diet that included cereal with milk. They didn’t know, nor did their parents, that the scientists had laced their food with radioactive tracers.

Quaker Oats Co. sponsored the experiment on the boys – without their parents’ knowledge or permission. The National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission also paid for the project.

In 1993, former Fernald students sued Quaker Oats and MIT. They settled out of court for $1.85 million in 1998. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported the studies were morally troubling though the doses involved were low and the children probably weren’t harmed. It also questioned the fairness of selecting institutionalized children.

The Fernald School closed in 2014.

200 Trapelo Rd., Waltham

5. Wamesit, Lowell

The former site of Wamesit, according to the People’s Guide

Middlesex Community College sits at the place where the Merrimack and Concord rivers meet. The land, once called Wamesit, belonged to a village of praying Indians from the Pennacook tribe. The Pennacook came to Wamesit to gather and to trade before English missionaries converted them to Christianity in the 1640s.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook leader, may have agreed to let missionaries establish the praying village as a way to curtail land grabs by the English. It didn’t work, of course. During King Philip’s War, neighbors murdered several of the Indians despite their peaceful and friendly attitudes toward the English. Wamesit disappeared after the war, its people either killed, captured or fled.

33 Walkway, Middlesex Community College, Lowell

6. Maypole Hill Park, Quincy

Maypole HIll. image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

A marker on Maypole Hill memorializes Thomas Morton, an English colonist who infuriated the Puritans who lived nearby at Plimoth Plantation. Morton, a lawyer, established a trading post and settlement he called Merrymount and invited his friends, including Native Americans, to party there. Morton had no problem with same sex relationships, which also angered the Puritans.

On May 1, 1627, Morton and his pals put up an 80-foot maypole, which the Puritans viewed as pagan. When he did it again a year later, they marched over, chopped it down and sent Morton back to England.

He returned, and they arrested him again, seized his property and deported him a second time to England.

Morton returned again 10 years later. The Puritans imprisoned him again, and he died in 1647.

A marker indicates where Morton’s Maypole once stood, and the seal of the City of Quincy marks the site of his trading post.

90 Samoset Ave., Quincy

End Notes to the People’s Guide

Images: Middlesex Community College, By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16292989; 60 State St. By Frankg – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2542027. Derby House By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002977.

This story last updated in 2023.

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Oscar Wilde Stirs Up Boston

In an early display of homophobia, 60 Harvard students dressed up like the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde when he delivered a lecture at the Boston Music Hall in 1882.

Wilde, later sentenced to prison for gross indecency with men, urged people to lead beautiful lives by surrounding themselves with beautiful things. He preached, ‘art for art’s sake.’

Wilde came to Boston with that message, part of a year-long lecture. He provoked strong reactions in New England.

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Some considered him decadent and subversive. The prominent Cambridge social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson accused him of writing pornographic poetry. The Boston Evening Transcript questioned, in verse, whether Oscar Wilde was a man or a woman.

But a group of Boston Bohemians – many of them gay — fell under his spell. And according to at least one critic, Wilde’s visit inspired cultural developments that made Boston the center of the aesthetic movement in America.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde toured the United States to promote a Gilbert and Sullivan play that made fun of him. The play, Patience, mocked the aesthetic movement then the rage in Britain.

The central character, Reginald Bunthorne, appears as a caricature of Wilde, a ‘fleshly poet’ committed to sensuous beauty.

The playwrights’ promoter, Richard D’Oyly Carte, thought a lecture tour by the celebrity aesthete would help sell tickets to the U.S. tour of the play.

Oscar Wilde, then a 27-year-old Irish celebrity poet and playwright, agreed to do the lecture tour. His motive, noted historian Douglass Shand-Tucci, was not to promote a play. Instead, he wanted to give force and coherence to the aesthetic movement emerging in the United States.

Wilde had a knack for attracting attention with his flamboyant dress, signature sunflower and tart witticisms. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad,” he said. “People are either charming or tedious.”

And he famously defined a cynic as one ‘who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Newport, R.I.

When Wilde arrived in New York in January 1882, he supposedly told a customs inspector he had nothing to declare but his genius. However, there’s no evidence he actually said that. He did say the Atlantic Ocean disappointed him – not stormy enough. A London periodical published a letter from the Atlantic Ocean expressing disappointment in Oscar Wilde.

Another publicity genius, P.T. Barnum, supposedly offered Oscar Wilde 200 pounds to ride Jumbo the Elephant carrying a sunflower, his trademark.

Thanks to his flair for attracting public notice his image appeared everywhere during his U.S. lecture tour. Drawings and photographs of him were ubiquitous in posters, newspapers, magazines, sheet music, even trading cards.

Oscar Wilde, sheet music, image courtesy Boston Public Library

He made a splash in Newport, R.I., where Julia Ward Howe entertained him at her home. He also lectured on “The Decorative Arts” at the Casino Theater.

His influence was still felt more than a hundred years later, when one of the Newport mansions, Rosecliff, mounted an exhibition in 2018 called, “Bohemian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement and Oscar Wilde’s Newport.”

Unmanly Oscar Wilde

There were plenty of dissenting voices, though. His hair and clothing especially drew criticism. He had a flamboyant stage outfit of velvet jacket, stockings and knee breeches.

He also wore his hair long with bangs – something only women did. When he spoke in New York, the Tribune reported he attracted ‘many pallid and aesthetic young men in dress suits and banged hair.’

Boston

He visited Boston twice, in January and in June. The city then considered itself the Athens of America, proud of its writers, artists and philosophers.

By 1880, the city had shed some of its Puritanical starchiness, at least in certain quarters. A Bohemian demimonde of artists, poets and architects had emerged. And the city was wild for the frothy musicals of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The poet James Russell Lowell had given Oscar Wilde a letter of introduction to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell had debuted the drag shows known as the Hasty Pudding Theatricals in 1837.

James Russell Lowell

Wilde had lunch with Holmes, and met artists and writers at the St. Botolph Club. The Boston Herald defended him in an interview, noting his ‘dress was no more of a departure from the ordinary than that of a dozen musicians and painters in Boston.’

Then came time for his lecture at the Boston Music Hall. Sixty Harvard students marched to their front-row seats, two abreast, carrying sunflowers and wearing knee pants, stockings and long-haired wigs.

Was it a homophobic prank to embarrass Oscar Wilde? Or was it a publicity stunt dreamed up by Wilde himself? Whatever the case, Wilde knew what they had planned and came on stage wearing a conservative suit.

Wilde looked around him and said, “I see about me certain signs of an aesthetic movement.”

And then in a stage whisper, he said, “Save me from my disciples.”

Later on his lecture tour a newspaper reporter asked him about the Harvard students. He said the lecture ‘passed off brilliantly.’

“You don’t suppose for a moment that a movement of any importance can be affected by 60 young men?” he said.

The Visionists

Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour created a sensation in Boston, according to The History Project in the 1998 book Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland.

No other city took Oscar Wilde so seriously, argued Shand-Tucci in Boston Bohemia. He influenced one Bohemian group calling itself the Visionists

The Visionists included architect Ralph Adams Cram, a leader of the Gothic Revival in architecture; photographer Fred Holland Day, a pioneer in art photography; and interior designer Ogden Codman, who wrote a book on decorating with Edith Wharton.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Visionist Daniel Berkeley Updike, a prominent printer and type designer, called his firm Merrymount Press, after New England’s earliest Bohemian, Thomas Morton. He famously printed the Book of Common Prayer, financed by J.P. Morgan.

Bernard Berenson traveled in the same circles as the Visionists, and he advised Isabella Steward Gardner on what artworks to buy. Gardner, of course, built a Venetian palace in Boston’s Back Bay, filled it with art and then willed it as an art museum.

Gardner Museum Courtyard

The Museum of Fine Arts, Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library are also viewed as triumphs of the aesthetic movement.

Shand-Tucci quotes Mary Blanchard, who wrote a study, Near the Coast of Bohemia,

…to many Americans, Boston was a city that symbolized older standards that stood in opposition to the commercialism and modernity of a cosmopolitan New York, … [but] it was also the seat of the new ‘gospel,’ aestheticism, a gospel that attacked those very standards.

Images: Oscar Wilde sheet music By BPL – Flickr: Oscar Wilde, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16006196.

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The Maypole That Infuriated the Puritans

Had it not been for his May Day party with a giant Maypole, Thomas Morton might have established a New England colony more tolerant, easygoing and fun than the one his dour Puritan neighbors created at Plymouth Plantation.

A traditional Maypole

A well-educated, well-connected, free-thinking Englishman, Morton came to America for business reasons. He held a senior partnership in a trading venture sponsored by the Crown. In 1624, he sailed aboard the Unity with Capt. Wollaston and 30 indentured servants. They arrived safely, settled in the future Quincy, Mass., and then began trading with the Indians for furs.

Morton wrote that he found two sorts of people in New England: the Christians and the Infidels. The Infidels he found ‘most full of humanity, and more friendly than the other.’

Morton would battle the Puritans over the next two decades using his wit, his pen, his political connections and his legal expertise. He even managed to get the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony revoked.

Unfortunately for Morton, he tied his fortunes to the Crown. When the Puritan Roundheads gained the ascendancy over Royalists in 1643, Massachusetts officials arrested him. They called him a Royalist agitator and threw him into prison. Today people might call him America’s first hippie.

Nathaniel Hawthorne best described Morton’s struggles with his neighbors in his short story, The Maypole of Merrymount:

Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.

Illustration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, ‘The Maypole of Merrymount’

Pagan Past

Thomas Morton was born in 1576 in Devonshire, England, a part of the country that still bore remnants of Merrie Old England’s pagan past. The son of a soldier, probably a younger son, he studied law in London at the Inns of Court, the barristers’ professional association.

Morton’s lawyering brought him the connections that brought him to New England. After he arrived he discovered he couldn’t get along with the Puritans at Plymouth Plantation. So he, Wollaston and the indentured servants established their own colony, Mount Wollaston. It grew quickly and grew prosperous.

Morton then parted ways with Wollaston in 1626 when he learned Wollaston sold indentured servants into slavery on Virginia tobacco plantations. Morton encouraged the remaining servants to rebel against Wollaston and set up their own colony.

They didn’t need much persuading. The servants organized themselves into a free community called Merrymount with Morton in command. He called himself the ‘host.’ Wollaston fled to Virginia.

Merrymount was a colonial utopia in which the settlers were considered ‘consociates.’ They lived in harmony with the Algonquin Indians. The Puritans were horrified that the liberal-minded Morton and his men consorted with native women. They considered Morton an impious, drunken libertine. And they didn’t like that his easygoing colony attracted escapees from Plymouth’s strictness.

Those Moles

For his part, Morton disdained the Puritans at Plymouth, who he called ‘those Moles.’ He complained they ‘keep ‘much ado about the tithe of mint and cumin, troubling their brains more than reason would require about things that are indifferent.’

Morton called the pompous John Endicott ‘that great swelling fellow, Captain Littleworth.’ He nicknamed the short Myles Standish ‘Captain Shrimpe.’

On May 1, 1627, Merrymount decided to throw a party in the manner of Merrie Olde England, Maypole and all. Morton hoped it would attract some Indian brides for his bachelor followers. According to Morton,

“The inhabitants of Merrymount … did devise amongst themselves to have … Revels, and merriment after the old English custom … & therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beer, & provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer, for all comers of that day. And upon Mayday they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drums, guns, pistols, and other fitting instruments, for that purpose; and there erected it with the help of Savages, that came thither of purpose to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot long, was reared up, with a pair of buckshorns nailed on, somewhat near unto the top of it; where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions, how to find out the way to mine Host of Ma-re Mount.”

Bye-bye Maypole

Gov. William Bradford was horrified by the ‘beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.’ After a second Maypole party the next year, Myles Standish led a party of armed men to Merrymount, seized Morton and put him in chains. Standish also took down the offending Maypole.

Not a shot was fired. According to Morton, the Merrymount inhabitants didn’t want bloodshed. According to Bradford, they’d had so much to drink they couldn’t resist.

Capt. Littleworth

Bradford feared executing Morton, who had too many friends in high places in London. He did maroon him on the Isles of Shoals until September, when an English ship took him back to England. During the next winter, an especially harsh one, John Endicott led a raid on Merrymount’s corn supply. The Puritans then chopped down what was left of the Maypole.

Morton returned to New England in 1629, only to find his friends the Indians decimated by plague. Most of the Merrymount residents scattered and the Puritans’ strength increased. In September 1630, the Puritans arrested Morton again. They banished him and burned down Merrymount.

Canaan

In England, Morton plotted his revenge. Even as William Bradford was writing his History of Plimoth Plantation, Morton wrote New English Canaan, a witty composition that praised the wisdom and humanity of the Indians and mocked the Puritans. It made him a celebrity in political circles.

He also began a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay Colony, trying to revoke their charter. He succeeded, mostly because of King Charles’ animosity toward the Puritans. When the court ordered the charter revoked in 1634, Morton planned to return to Merrymount.

The Puritans, however, rejected the English court’s order. From 1637 to 1643, Morton and Sir Ferdinando Gorges petitioned for either a charter or an enforcement action. Unfortunately for Morton, the Crown had its own troubles – namely, the English Civil War.

Back to Plymouth

In 1642, Morton returned to Plymouth again, and again the Puritans arrested him. Not only did they view him as a ‘Royalist agitator,’ they blamed him for getting the charter revoked. They then sent him to prison in Boston, but didn’t charge him. Eventually, the Puritans granted the ill and aging Morton clemency.

Morton then spent his final days in York, Maine. He died in 1647.

Over the years other rebels and free-thinkers have lived in Merrymount, now Wollaston. Anne Hutchinson, who challenged the Puritan theocracy, lived there with her husband when they first arrived in New England in 1634. John Hancock was born there, and John Quincy Adams’ great-grandfather built a house on land in Wollaston. In 1925, a man named Howard Johnson built the first Howard Johnson’s there.

This story about the maypole that infuriated the Puritans was updated in 2022. Read more about Thomas Morton in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England by Peter C. Mancall. You can help independent bookstores and The New England Historical Society by buying it here.

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The Puritans Ban Gambling and a Whole Lot of Other Things

The Puritans had barely arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they banned gambling. And then they banned a lot of other things.

On March 22, 1631, the General Court issued the following ordinance:

Must have missed church on Sunday, or went dancing after services

It is … ordered that all persons whatsoever that have cards, dice or tables in their houses, shall make away with them before the next court under pain of punishment.

More social control soon followed. Seven months after they outlawed gaming, the Massachusetts Puritans decided to punish adultery with death (though the death penalty was rare). They banned fancy clothing, living with Indians and smoking in public.

Missing Sunday services would land you in the stocks. Celebrating Christmas would cost you five shillings. The only holidays they celebrated were Election Day; Commencement Day, to celebrate college graduation; and Training Day, which involved military exercises. Oh, and Thanksgiving.

Young single men were especially suspect. Just to live in a community, they needed the express permission of the town if they weren’t married or had no servant or if they weren’t a public officer. The penalty for breaking that law was 20 shillings a week.

Haunting Fear of Someone’s Happiness

No wonder H.L. Mencken said, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

H.L. Mencken

Mencken, in his Book of Prefaces, attacked the Puritans in an essay, “Puritanism as a Literary Force.” In it, he argued the Puritans banned ideas–other people’s ideas, that is.

The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution – these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States.

One idea the Puritans censored was that anyone should spend Sunday afternoon playing or watching sports. In England, King James I had tried to counteract Puritan influence by ordering his Book of Sports read in every church. The book encouraged certain fun activities after Sunday services. Those included archery, leaping, vaulting, Morris dances and Whitsun-ales.

The Book of Sports also said people could either conform or leave. So thousands of Puritans sailed to New England between 1620 and 1640.

Puritan Fun, Sort Of

Thomas Morton went to his grief breaking Puritan rules. A free-thinking entrepreneur, he set up a trading post in the future Quincy, Mass. He called his little settlement “Merrymount.” He horrified his neighbors in Plymouth by consorting with native women.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

One May Day Morton went too far. He put up a Maypole, something the Puritans abhorred. Myles Standish led a party of armed men to Merrymount, seized Morton and put him in chains. Then he chopped down the Maypole.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about it in his story, The Maypole of Merrymount. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” he wrote.

To be fair, the Puritans did have some fun. They allowed hunting, fishing and archery, and they held athletic contests (never on Sunday though). They drank beer, wine and liquor, but not to excess. The Town of New Haven in 1656 required that anyone licensed to serve alcohol had to make sure his customers didn’t get drunk, didn’t drink past 9 pm and didn’t ‘continue tipling’ for more than an hour.

The Puritans had a reason for their dour outlook. They viewed life’s pleasures as nothing but chimeras, especially when compared to the happiness of heaven.

Richard Baxter, after Robert White painting,(1670). No Maypole for him.

Puritan theologian Richard Baxter explained,

I cannot but look upon all the glory and dignity of this world, lands and lordships, crowns and kingdoms, even as on some brain-sick, beggarly fellow, that borrows fine clothes, and plays, the part of a king or lord for an hour on a stage, and then comes down, and the sport is ended, and they are beggars again.

Puritanism Lingers

The Puritan sensibility over time loosened gradually, though not completely. In 1756, the priggish John Adams wrote, “Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiard table among rakes and fools.”

Christmas didn’t win wide acceptance in New England until after the Civil War.

And in the 20th century, critics would call Boston-born Bobby Kennedy “the last Puritan.” They viewed him as ruthless, idealistic and not a lot of fun. One FBI agent recounted how J. Edgar Hoover tried to catch him in an indiscretion. “We used to watch him at parties, where he would order one glass o scotch and still be sipping from the same glass two hours later.”

With thanks to The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730, edited by Alden Vaughan. This story was updated in 2023.

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