With a new year upon us, I can confidently predict that in 2025 a new building project will outrage the people of Plymouth. You are guaranteed to hear comments about graft, under-the-table payouts, and the greed of developers. And count on frequent complaints about traffic, the loss of small-town life, and the overall ruination of Plymouth.
But in the end, who is really to blame? I can promise you that greased palms are not the answer. As someone who is deeply involved in town development, I have yet to be invited onto the private jet of any local official to visit their secret island hideout in the Caribbean. No, the “blame” for Plymouth’s recent development belongs solely to a group of individuals who lived long before any of us were born – which I’ll be happy to explain in this very tongue-in-cheek article that, in the end, has a serious point to make.
The responsibility for our current situation rests solely in the hands of a decision made 405 years ago by the Pilgrim fathers. Puzzled? Let me explain by revisiting our town’s storied history.
We should all know the Pilgrims never intended to settle in Plymouth. Their original destination was the mouth of the Hudson River. Due to the unseaworthy Speedwell, a delay in departure and bad weather at sea (as well as possible purposeful bad navigation) our future villains found themselves off Cape Cod. Attempts to head south were thwarted by dangerous seas so the decision was made to anchor at present day Provincetown harbor. Anyone familiar with Provincetown knows the town lacks a fresh water source and suitable soil for raising crops. This forced our gang to look elsewhere for a permanent settlement site.
They began in the inner arm of Cape Cod. It wasn’t until a storm drove our merry band onto the shores of Clark’s Island, however, that they turned in desperation to the idea of settling nearby. With winter upon them, a decision was needed, and it was this decision that would chart the rest of Plymouth’s history. Personally, I think the Pilgrims acted too hastily. Yes, there was a protected harbor, freshwater brooks, and cleared land – but was that all that was needed for a colony to grow and thrive over time? In my opinion the answer is a resounding no.
Plymouth Harbor was the first strike against the location. When the Mayflower II was undergoing its multi-year restoration, I gave walking tours for Plimoth Plantation (now Plimoth Patuxet) in lieu of visitors being able to board the ship at State Pier. Few of my guests had any idea that the harbor was too shallow to allow the Mayflower to deposit its passengers directly onto Plymouth Rock.
The Pilgrims faced a daily commute by smaller boat (shallop) to the mouth of Town Brook. At low tide, a majority of Plymouth Harbor is exposed mudflats, which meant that quick passage from the Mayflower – anchored out by the location of Duxbury’s Pier Light (Bug Light) – to the new settlement was only possible at high tide. If the tide was low, the trip required a long journey down the natural channel that runs alongside Plymouth Beach. Even by sail, this journey could take an hour. Without wind, relying on manpower to row, it took much longer. Something to think about in mid-February when that cold east wind howls.
Our shallow harbor, although protected from the open ocean, limited Plymouth’s potential from the start. As settlements grew and Massachusetts looked to the sea, the colony lacked quick access to the open ocean. With deeper, easily navigated harbors, providing quicker access to trading routes and nearby whaling grounds, Boston, Salem, Newburyport, and New Bedford proved better choices than Plymouth. Those ports supported towns with both growing populations and wealth.
Plymouth suffered its second strike because none of the various brooks and streams that empty into Plymouth Harbor are sufficiently deep or long enough to allow for shipping goods and passengers to the inland of the colony. And as the nascent nation grew, our waterways lacked adequate flow to power industrial complexes. Industry looked to the Merrimack River (Lawrence and Lowell), the Acushnet River (New Bedford), the Taunton River (Fall River), as well as the Charles River (Boston and Cambridge) to build substantial manufacturing complexes.
And we finally counted three strikes against us because of Plymouth’s poor ability to sustain agriculture. If the Wampanoag’s Squanto had not assisted the Pilgrims, they would have most likely starved. Plymouth so happens to be located almost entirely in a pine barren, consisting of soil that is sandy, acidic and nutrient poor. With so much acreage unsuitable for farming or even grazing, Plymouth remained largely undeveloped for hundreds of years. Even as late as 1960, Plymouth’s population was merely 14,000, compared with Salem’s 40,000, much less the City of Boston, at nearly 700,000.
But 1960 proved to be a turning point. With a virtually untouched stretch of coastline, Plymouth seemed a perfect location to the engineers looking to build a nuclear power plant – which began generating power in 1972 – to help meet growing electricity demands. There was only one residential property on the site, acres of vacant land surrounding it, and a never-ending supply of cold sea water to cool the reactor.
With the nuclear plant supporting the tax base, acres of vacant land, and a newly opened highway from Boston to Cape Cod, Plymouth would become a developer’s paradise. Spurred by white flight from Boston and low property taxes that made a single-family home easy to afford on a modest income, the sleepy town of Plymouth was about to change. Subdivision tracts popped up overnight. Our population started to climb and what looks to many like breakneck growth is mostly just making up for lost time. (The Pilgrim plant went offline in 2019.)
I can only imagine if the weather had been better 405 years ago the Pilgrims might have sailed right past Plymouth, especially if it had been low tide. They might have moved up the coast to Marshfield, Scituate, Weymouth, or even Boston. But all the reasons that kept Plymouth a cozy small town for so long are now long gone – leaving only nostalgia for a bygone time.
So when you hear of the next development project that threatens to ruin the Plymouth of our dreams, I propose that we start by blaming the Pilgrim fathers. It’s always more fun to point the finger at our predecessors.
Architect Bill Fornaciari is a lifelong resident of Plymouth (except for a three-year adventure going West as a young man) and is the owner of BF Architects in Plymouth. His firm specializes in residential work and historic preservation. Have a question or idea for this column? Email Bill at billfornaciari@gmail.com.