[Plymouth Rock, Plymouth, Massachusetts, showing engraved date 1620"]"

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Plymouth Rock, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is the focus here, with the date 1620 cut into its surface, the year the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower. The rock has long been treated as the landing point of the colonists, though historians have debated whether they stepped onto it at all, and the carved date is a reminder of how the site became a national symbol. This c1947 photoprint, made by Don Morgan, shows the stone as it was presented to visitors in the mid-twentieth century, when the Pilgrim story was widely told as a founding myth of the country.

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