PLYMOUTH, Massachusetts — Plymouth Rock was having a rough Thanksgiving.
During the holiday week this year, footprints defiled the monument’s hallowed ground, a protected patch of sand on Plymouth Harbor. Someone had vandalized the stately portico that houses the landmark, scrawling “Death to America.” And, perhaps most disrespectfully, several visitors had referred to it as “Plymouth Pebble.”
“People laugh about it. People call it a pebble. People say that it’s smaller than they thought it should be,” said Janet Aveni, who works at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums’ gift shop, which sells souvenir rocks.
Granted, an Appalachian peak would not make sense in this sandy hilled coastal environment where the Mayflower Pilgrims landed in 1620 and held a harvest feast with the Wampanoag the following year. But considering the epochal events that occurred here, visitors may be expecting a rock more exceptional than one that looks like you could find at Home Depot.
“I thought Plymouth Rock would be a boulder out on a cliff,” said Sundance Henry, who was visiting from Washington state with her husband and two teens, who were equally underwhelmed. “It belongs in a parking lot, not representing the beginning of America.”
Monuments and memorials shoulder a colossal responsibility. Sites embodying a major historical or cultural moment create expectations matching the magnitude of the occasion or accomplishment. Standing before the Liberty Bell, Mona Lisa and Plymouth Rock, we anticipate a sense of awe, reverence or humility.
Instead, at many heralded attractions, we hear the sad trombone of disappointment.
“It’s just a rock with a date on it,” said Larry Prescott, a Floridian visiting his mother-in-law, who said she’d rather run errands than gaze at her hometown’s pet rock. “I’ve got nicer rocks in my collection at home.”
Landmarks that don’t live up to their potential put visitors in a bind. We may feel compelled to see them, fulfilling our duty as inquisitive and enlightened travelers, but end up regretting that decision.
Would it be better to skip them or scale down our expectations? Or maybe we need to dig deeper, appreciating the symbolism and history over physical size.
Bigger than it looks
Plymouth Rock attracts more than million people a year, according to the town’s tourism office. Yet it appears on many roundups of the world’s most underwhelming sites. Reddit commenters ridicule it, and travelers ding it with one-star reviews.
Even the landmark’s defenders concede its shortcomings.
“In textbooks and in the iconography, it has a larger-than-life placement,” said Tom Begley, executive director of Plimoth Patuxet Museums, which includes the Mayflower II, a full-scale reproduction of the Pilgrims’ vessel. “I don’t know if it could ever be the right size.”
Donna D. Curtin, executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, described the rock’s composition as a muffin, with the top portion visible and the bottom embedded in the sand. In other words, it’s bigger than it looks. The roughly 10-ton rock, which is less than 7 feet wide, wasn’t always so puny.
Originally measuring 11 to 14 feet high and 16 feet around, according to a Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation employee, the boulder is a fragment of its old self. Since 1741, when a nonagenarian named Thomas Faunce identified the rock as the English Separatists’ landing pad, the gray slab has been excavated, transported by ox-drawn cart, dropped, mended, divvied up and picked away by souvenir hunters.
One chunk served as a doorstop before retiring at the Pilgrim Hall Museum, a short roll from its original setting. Another section resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington.
A history of unremarkable attractions
In addition to Plymouth Rock, “Mona Lisa,” the Liberty Bell and Manneken Pis, a Brussels statue remarkable only for its naughtiness, frequently earn the ignominious distinction of “underwhelming.”
The Roaming Renegades, a couple who posts travel content, call out the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen for being overrated.
For solo travel expert Emily Hart, Mount Rushmore, the southernmost point of the United States in Key West, Florida, and the Four Corners Monument aren’t worth the trip alone.
“It’s cool to be able to say that you were in four states at once, but it’s very remote and takes a long time to get there,” Hart said of the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. “There’s also not much there. You are just in four corners.”
Thompson M. Mayes, chief legal officer and general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation who was let down by Casa Romuli in Rome, said we can flip our disappointments into more positive experience. The monument can act as a springboard, launching us into a certain time, place and people. We can learn from it and maybe even be inspired and fortified by it.
“Having your expectations be defeated a little bit can be an opportunity,” Mayes said. “Open your mind to questions about it and invite yourself to find out more about it.”
A larger monument to Pilgrims
From the deck of the Mayflower II, tied up a few feet away on the waterfront, I couldn’t see Plymouth Rock.
Begley turned his back to town and pointed at a spot by a long, flat strip of land where the vessel parked after 66 days at sea and a stop in Provincetown on Cape Cod. He traced the path the Pilgrims’ small boats would have probably taken, from ship to shore, where a hill, a natural water source and/or a rock may have beckoned.
From Water Street, I couldn’t spot it, either.
Plymouth Rock lives in a shallow pit at Pilgrim Memorial State Park, cocooned in a columned portico befitting a shrine to a Roman god or minor president. Visitors peer down at the rock, its “1620” engraving and scars from an old injury visible from above.
A surveillance camera sees all but doesn’t stop everyone, as the footprints and graffiti attest. A teenager accompanied by his mother blurted out that she has photos of herself sitting on the rock. A DCR employee erasing the scribbling said he wasn’t surprised.
During a chilly Thanksgiving week, visitors stopped for a photo or video, never staying for long. When asked to size up the rock, most people said it was surprisingly small. Only one spectator, a preschooler, countered with, “It’s sooo big!”
A department staff member asked whether anyone wanted to learn more about the attraction. A gloved hand shot up. He described its glacial origins; Faunce’s wish to gaze at it, which sparked interest in displaying and preserving the artifact; and Revolutionary War times, when colonists feared that British soldiers would snatch it.
The history lesson ended in 1880, when the rock was reunited with its lower half, a symbol made whole.
“Plymouth Rock has been a symbol for 400 years. It was created at a time when people were looking hard to find something that would unite them,” Begley said. “It holds all these stories for us to unpack and explore and understand what it means to be a symbol, a monument.”
Though I had gained an appreciation for Plymouth Rock, no longer measuring its worth by yardstick, I was more intrigued by the 81-foot-tall National Monument to the Forefathers, considered to be the largest freestanding solid-granite monument in the country.
A DCR employee told me he had learned about it on a social media reel about alternatives to underwhelming attractions.
The post When it comes to underwhelming monuments, size does matter appeared first on Washington Post.
