All you Americans.
Do ye maintain it?”
—George P. Baker
From “The Pilgrim Spirit,” a pageant written by George P. Baker, produced at Plymouth during the Tercentenary Celebration of the Landing of the Pilgrims, 1921.
The Colony and Town Records
1620
1691
Long antedating the inscriptions of bronze and stone, are the early written records of the settlement, both of the Colony and of the Town. From them may be traced the affairs of the Plymouth community from its beginning.
Nothing can give a more vivid description of the details of Pilgrim life, or the self-reliance with which the infant colony attacked the problems of an independent state, than the yellowed manuscripts in the handwriting of Gov. Bradford and Gov. Winslow. They record questions debated and decided by the assembled freemen of the Colony, who chose their officers of government, and made their laws, under the Compact framed by the Pilgrims before leaving the Mayflower.