Looking to the north, beyond the town of Kingston, lying, with its sweet rose-gardens, on the pretty winding river named for that arch betrayer, Captain Jones, of the Mayflower, we see Duxbury and the green slopes of Captain’s Hill, so named in honor of Myles Standish, who from the top of his gray stone monument still guards us in effigy. Lingering near the fort and the guns he loved so well, he must often have looked this way, and admired the fine position this hill offered for a homestead. And as with years the colony grew larger, as children came to him and Barbara, and when his first Company of Standish Guards were in perfect training and could be relied upon to defend the colony at need, he bought out Winslow’s share in the famous red cow, and led the way to the new fields he longed to conquer. There he was soon followed by John Alden and Priscilla, the Brewsters and other families, and at Marshfield, near by, the Winslows became their neighbors. So some eleven years after the landing came the first separation, which though not a wide one was a sore grief to their tender-hearted governor.
Among the now rare gravestones of the seventeenth century on Burial Hill, we look in vain for the most familiar names: Elder Brewster died in 1644, lamented by all the colony; Edward Winslow died at sea in 1655, and in the two years following this sad loss Myles Standish and Governor Bradford ended their labors. So closed the lives of these leaders of men. Descendants, brave, wise and strong like themselves, continued worthily the work they had nobly begun.
From 1630, Plymouth held friendly intercourse with the Boston Bay Colony. The terrors of the war with Philip, treacherous son of the friendly Massasoit, had united her with the neighboring colonies against a common foe, and at length, after seventy-one years of nearly independent existence, we find her, in 1692, absorbed, with some regret, into the royal province of Massachusetts, but still ready to take her part in public affairs.
That the rôle played by her was a worthy one, the tablets about us testify. Heroes of the expedition against Louisbourg, in 1745, lie here; more than a score of Plymouth patriots who served in the Revolution, and many a brave soldier who won his laurels in the War of 1861. Under this stone, with its quaint urn and willow-branch, rests the famous naval hero of the Revolutionary war, Captain Simeon Sampson, whose cousin Deborah spun, dyed, and wove the cloth for the suit in which she left home to serve as a soldier. Their story, and that of many another hero and heroine now lying here, have been well told by Mrs. Jane Goodwin Austin.
Beneath his symbolic scallop-shell we read the name of Elder Faunce, who knew the Pilgrims, and, living for ninety-nine years, formed an important link between two centuries. The stone consecrated to the memory of the Rev. Chandler Robbins, who for nearly twoscore years toward the close of the last century gave his faithful services to the first parish, reminds us that at one time the town fathers found it advisable to request him “not to have more horses grazing on Burial Hill than shall be really necessary!”
Here, in old times, could be had a grand view of the shipping, come from the West Indies and all parts of the world; from here the news of many fatal shipwrecks had been spread through the town, to rouse willing help for suffering sailors; here, too, no doubt, men’s souls were often tempted to incur the fine of twenty shillings, the cost of “telling a lie about seeing a whale,” in those strict days when a plain lie, if “pernicious,” was taxed at half that price!
Old Father Time with his scythe and hour-glass—symbols of his power—rules here over seven generations; but lingering while the setting sun illumines the harbor and the surrounding hills with the same radiance that rejoiced the first comers, while Manomet glows with a deeper purple, and the twin lights of the Gurnet shine out, we may still feel in very deed that
“The Pilgrim spirit has not fled.”
Turning from the story of Plymouth, as written on the lichen-covered headstones on Burial Hill, let us wend our way under the shady elms of Court Street to Pilgrim Hall, built in 1824 by the Pilgrim Society, instituted four years earlier. Here we may trace, in the many treasured reminders of their daily lives, the annals of those brave souls in whom
“ ...persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.”