Bartholomew Gosnold Landing Monument

Rochester, MA

In the old towns of Plymouth County, families often buried their dead not in a village churchyard but on their own land, among the trees they had cleared and farmed. This marker identifies one such spot — a patch of Rochester woodland set apart as the resting place of John Delano. The Delano name runs deep in this corner of southeastern Massachusetts, reaching back to the settler families who put down roots in the old Plymouth Colony.

Barnstable, MA

Abraham Blish was among the first English settlers of Barnstable in 1640, part of the Puritan migration that planted towns across Plymouth Colony. Like many early townsmen he shouldered a rotation of civic duties — grand juror, constable, hayward, and surveyor of highways — and served in the colony's militia. In 1658 he built one of the region's earliest grist mills, grinding the settlers' grain into meal and helping a young community feed itself.

Eastham, MA

Deacon John Doane was among the founding settlers of Eastham, one of the small band of Plymouth Colony families who pushed out onto Cape Cod's sandy elbow in the 1640s to farm and fish. Born in England around 1590, he crossed the Atlantic in the great wave of Puritan migration and became a trusted figure in the young colony, serving as a church deacon and one of Plymouth's governing assistants. This granite shaft, raised in 1869 by a descendant, marks the spot where his house once stood — a reminder that a windswept Cape field was once the dooryard of a first-generation New England homestead.

Provincetown, MA

Before the Pilgrims ever reached Plymouth, their ship the Mayflower first dropped anchor in the sheltered curl of Provincetown Harbor in November 1620. There, still aboard ship, forty-one men signed a brief compact agreeing to govern themselves by "just and equal laws" — one of the earliest self-governing agreements in what became the United States. This bronze relief fixes that moment in metal, on the very shore where it happened.