Massachusetts

The Pilgrims did not land at Plymouth first. The Mayflower made landfall at the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620, anchored off what is now Provincetown, and the passengers signed the Mayflower Compact there before anyone went ashore. They spent about a month exploring the Cape before crossing the bay to settle at Plymouth in December.

That story became a national founding myth in the 1800s, and the pictures show it happening. Plymouth Rock was identified by local tradition in 1741, more than a century after the landing, and it was moved, split and enshrined several times before it settled under its present canopy. The National Monument to the Forefathers went up in Plymouth in 1889. The Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, a granite tower that looks like it belongs in Italy, was finished in 1910. Prints of the landing, the first Thanksgiving and the signing of the Compact were turned out by the thousands, and most of them were drawn by artists working 200 years after the fact.

Cape Cod itself was a working place long before it was a summer place. Its towns lived on fishing, whaling, saltworks and coastal shipping. Cranberries were first cultivated on the Cape in the early 1800s, and the bogs show up in pictures alongside windmills, weathered shingle houses and lighthouses set on eroding bluffs. The Cape Cod Canal opened in 1914 and cut the Cape off from the mainland by water, saving ships a dangerous run around the outer shore.

Southeastern Massachusetts had a different character again. New Bedford was the whaling capital of the world in the mid-1800s, and Fall River became one of the largest cotton textile centers in the country. Their photographs are of wharves, mill buildings and the neighborhoods of the people who worked in them.

Something worth noticing in the Cape pictures is how bare the land looks. Much of it had been cleared of trees for fuel, pasture and building by the 1800s, and the open, sandy, windswept country in old photographs is quite different from the pine-covered Cape of today.