A childhood friend’s social media post got me thinking about Place, specifically the where I live, Duxbury, Massachusetts, and the surrounding towns: Plymouth, Middleboro, Kingston, Marshfield. Hannah noted that her genealogy research was taking her to fun places in Europe and that she was learning new things about her ancestors, most recently that one of her great greats decided to change their family name to a new, totally made up name, and from then on only used this new name.
Hannah and I share a common ancestor, John Howland, the Pilgrim who may be best known for falling off the Mayflower during the journey across the Atlantic in 1620. He would have surely drowned were it not for the good fortune of grabbing a line that was trailing off the back of the ship and being hauled back aboard by his shipmates. More correctly, the ancestor we share is John’s father. The nearly-drowned John Howland is my 8th great grandfather and something like Hannah’s 9th great uncle. That two friends share a Mayflower ancestor is not as unusual as it might seem. I read that some thirty five million people can trace their roots back to those original settlers. Anyway, Hannah’s father, another John Howland, may have been named after that pilgrim and Hannah may have been named for the pilgrim’s daughter, also Hannah, who would marry a man named John Tinkham. But I’ll get back to the Tinkhams.
Hannah Tinkham's Headstone in Middleborough Massachusetts
We all know that after a little searching the Pilgrims settled in what would become the town of Plymouth where they found a well-sheltered, if somewhat shallow, harbor, plenty of fresh water and favorable land for farming. In fact, much of the land had already put to agriculture by Native Americans before the Europeans arrived. They also found a bay teeming with fish: cod, striped bass, and bluefish. Herring ran seasonally up the rivers. They used to grab lobster by hand in the shallows and when the tide was out oysters, clams and mussels were plentiful. The Pilgrims hunted duck and geese. Deer, rabbits, woodchucks and raccoon supplemented their diet. These animals were also prey to fox, coyote and even cougars that lived in the area. Wildlife was abundant and the land was favorable.
As soon as the Pilgrims arrived they started to change the landscape. First with small shelters in the original settlement, simple wooden houses and sheds, and later with more substantial structures; dams, piers and mills, structures that altered the landscape and the rivers, the streams, and the bays. As Plymouth grew and as its importance to the economy increased the need to protect the town and the harbor also grew. The colonists built Gurnet Fort at the end of a long barrier beach, which starts in Marshfield to the north and stretches several miles south through Duxbury and into Plymouth. The fort was constructed to overlook and defend the entrance to Duxbury Bay and within it Plymouth Harbor. Built in 1776 for the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, it had a 60-man garrison and several cannons to assure that unwelcome ships did not enter the bay. It also apparently had a cannon aimed to fire onto the beach to the north to ward off any potential land invasion. The idea of landing an army on a barrier beach that is no more than 100 yards wide and has no fresh water, where soldiers would then have to slog across a mile of mudflat to get to the mainland might seem absurd, but I suppose the need to protect the fort itself was real. The fort was maintained through the Civil War and was renamed Fort Andrew in the 1860s. A lighthouse was constructed on the property in 1842 and eventually the land was formally transferred to the Coast Guard. Though the cannons and buildings associated with the fort are long gone, the lighthouse and earthwork remain. The lighthouse is one of the oldest wooden lighthouses in the country.
Whether my ancestors were garrisoned at the fort or maintained the lighthouse is a research project for another day. For the moment I am comfortable supposing that at some point over the fort’s near hundred year history one of my forefathers, maybe a Tinkham, a Howland, a Baldwin or a King, all of whom lived in the area, probably served at that spot in some capacity for some period of time.
Some 400 years after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, and some 200 years, plus or minus, after the fort and the lighthouse were originally built I can ride my bike out the long beach road to stand on the same spot of land that the Pilgrims saw as they entered Duxbury Bay. Turning to the southwest I see the recently decommissioned nuclear power plant and, near it, the bustling commercial waterfront that is downtown Plymouth. I imagine tourists in a gazebo leaning over a railing to take a selfie with Plymouth Rock in the background. Turning toward the northwest I see Clark’s Island where a group of Pilgrims spent a couple nights during their expeditionary efforts to identify a suitable place to set up shop. They would later sail their shallop back to the Mayflower, which was anchored for a time in Provincetown, to give the remaining passengers the news that Plymouth, then known as Thiever’s Bay, was where they would establish a colony.
Turning farther north I look along the axis of Duxbury Beach and imagine men, maybe my fourth great grandfather, Amos Tinkham, driving horse-drawn wagons, laboring along the beach with armaments and supplies for the fort. How long did it take? Surely, much of the equipment and stores must have come by boat but some of it must have been dragged or carried those many miles through the sand.
Today I ride my bike for 20 minutes over a gravel-pack road to reach the lighthouse. Many others drive the same route to get to a beach and the dozens of cottages on the Gurnet and nearby Saquish. There are many fewer ducks, geese and shorebirds at the lighthouse, on the beach, in the Bay than there used to be. The fish are less plentiful and it has been a long time since anyone caught lobsters by hand in the shallows. The deer, rabbits, foxes and coyotes are still here but they too were much more plentiful years ago. Cougars haven’t been seen for maybe a hundred years. We humans have a way of decimating species.
But if I stand in just the right spot, my back to the lighthouse, looking in such a way as to not see the powerboats coming and going, if I tune out the thrumming of inboard and outboard boat motors, the SUVs and pickups crunching on the gravel road on their way to the beach, if I concentrate instead on the rush of the wind through the grass, the sound of the waves on the beach, the chatter of gulls and the cry of the osprey overhead. If I concentrate really hard, I can take myself back and imagine the view Amos Tinkham might have had during his watch, the sight that John Howland might have beheld 400 years ago.
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