MAN: We have a reference to the Pilgrims in what is arguably…

Two men are sitting in a South Boston bar, reciting lyrics about Pilgrims to each other.

MAN: Oh beautiful for Pilgrim feet…

One of them is an audio producer who tried to find a quiet place in Southie for an interview and has instead somehow brought his interviewee to the loudest place possible. The other man, the interviewee, is running late for rehearsal with his band, but doesn’t seem to mind. He’s eager, both on the clock and off it to talk about, heck even sing about, the Pilgrims and Plymouth, Massachusetts, even if it means competing with the songs in the background. Basically, he’s an ideal Iconography guest.

Welcome to a special bonus interview episode of Iconography, the desert course in our glorious Thanksgiving feast of audio content on the icons of Plymouth. I guess this is the pumpkin pie? Yes, pumpkin pie, with Cool Whip.

I’m Charles Gustine your guide on this tour of icons real and imagined, and I’m pleased to be able to give ya’ll a behind the scenes glimpse into what it takes to plan a quadricentenary commemoration. To do that, I sat down with one of the people planning Plymouth 400.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Logan., Communications Manager for Plymouth 400 Inc, the organization that’s working on the commemoration of 1620 in 2020.

Brian was the first person I spoke to about the icons of Plymouth, an enthusiastic early champion of what I was doing across this mini-series on America’s Hometown who put me in touch with pretty much everyone I spoke to across all the episodes. I think it’s only fitting that he gets the last word on Plymouth, which also happens to be his hometown.

BRIAN: I never would have imagined not only living back in my hometown but working in my hometown. But I’m working on, essentially, even though we’re a non-profit and it’s a commemoration, our quote-unquote “product” is this town that I grew up in, is this history that I’ve been surrounded by my whole life.

Okay, with that established, I broach a topic I’ve been kind of morbidly curious about – what happens to the Communications Director of 2020’s Plymouth 400… in 2021?

BRIAN: Right, are you hinting at the expiration date basically? (laughs)

Yeah, that’s something I’ve never come across. I’ve certainly done freelance before, I’ve done contract work, but never something that had such a… defined… y’know like I said expiration date. I’ll make the absolute most of what’s happening here and enjoy the fact that I’m involved in something so historic. Y’know as I’ve mentioned, I’m passionate about it, I think it’s a once in a lifetime thing, you don’t often have a quadricentennial, or even a 100 year anniversary. And especially for the first town, America’s hometown, as we say.

There’s also a chance I’m being a bit overdramatic. Brian won’t be out on the street on January 1st, 2021.

BRIAN: So while it is, by design, temporary it certainly is something that has legs. First, we have the anniversary of the first Thanksgiving in 2021, so can’t forget that… and then, in rapid succession, Massachusetts has about 30 other cities and towns commemorating their own quadricentennials – 400 year anniversaries - throughout the next decade or so. These will all be part of what’s being called Massachusetts 400, and that’s actually something our Executive Director had started.

So in some ways, what these other communities get to do is watch all the mistakes that Plymouth 400 makes and correct them on their own commemorations, but I do think that we have some thought of being involved in that ongoing process of Massachusetts 400. I don’t know what form that will take yet, but the point being, there are possible trajectories here that wouldn’t have it all coming to a crashing halt.

CHARLES: Right there’s going to be basically a cottage industry over the next…?

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly! As we get closer to 2020 this will pick up more steam and could very well morph into something that keeps me involved in local and regional history and tourism. And people have already started reaching out to us believe it or not. The first anniversary that comes up I think is Weymouth 400, and that’s in two years from now…

Listener, since recording this, I bought a home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and am now  breathlessly counting down to Weymouth 400. 2022 baby! Quincy, which sits between Weymouth and Boston will follow in 2025, Salem in 2026, and Boston in 2030. And while it’s easy to imagine the headlines about Boston’s birthday, one of the lessons these other municipalities might take from Plymouth is the town’s careful use of the word “commemoration”. They’ve been very diligent about framing 2020 as a commemoration, and so I ask what the rationale is behind that?

BRIAN: It’s so funny, I was talking to one of my coworkers about this the other day. It doesn’t naturally fall off the tongue. And I understand that, but a lot of what we’re doing is sort of not rewriting history but re-righting the ship and telling it the way it should have been told and the way it should be told quite frankly in schools, good, bad, ugly, and otherwise.

We call it a commemoration rather than Plymouth’s Birthday or a big celebration – lot of noise in the background - because, while it’s certainly a point of pride for many different people who have perhaps Mayflower ancestry, folks that are from Plymouth, and it’s something that they can look forward to, it’s just not very celebratory for folks who were here for thousands of years, whose people were here for thousands of years before the Mayflower arrived. You know what I’m saying?

So when people say these things like “Eyyyy, the big birthday parties coming up!” or “We’re gonna celebrate Plymouth’s birthday,” I understand it, I definitely understand it. Like I said it flows naturally. But we do have to take a look at who’s involved, and for the first time we are telling the Native story in the first person voice, yknow not speaking on behalf of other people.

I’ve talked about that effort throughout this series on Plymouth, especially when visiting the Our Story exhibit for the Squanto episode and in the First Thanksgiving episode. Brian mentions a yearly event that came up in the Thanksgiving episode.

BRIAN: Every year in Plymouth, there’s a gathering down on Cole’s Hill which is a historic spot where many of the Pilgrims were buried that first winter. There’s a gathering of people celebrating Thanksgiving, but then there’s also a gathering, which is a very interesting juxtaposition, of people celebrating the national day of mourning. And for the most part believe it or not, it’s relatively peaceful. It happens every single year, people expect it, it’s not sort of this surprise demonstration. There are flareups from time to time. But it’s sort of an acknowledgment that there are two entities, two sides of the story. And that’s definitely the most stark way to take a look at it, where you have people observing this solemn occasion and people celebrating Thanksgiving. Just like the commemoration itself.

Believe me – personally I’m very proud of the fact that we’re not trying to commemorate an invasion or a conquering of one nation by another - there’s approximately 50 years there, as I think you’ve said on the podcast in the past, where they had relative peace between the indigenous people here and their guests the Pilgrims. I’m happy that it was truly a tiny group of religious separatists in search of a place to practice their religion the way they wanted to.

Which Brian admits, isn’t to say that they didn’t have racist, colonialist ideas about the people they encountered in the New World, or that they were never violent – they were – but it is fair to say that they weren’t driven by those things. They weren’t here to conquer or convert. They came to worship their god their way, and as part of doing that, they made alliances and stuck to those alliances; it was the children and grandchildren of the Mayflower Pilgrims that ended what had been a mutually beneficial half-century of collaboration with the Wampanoag tribe, leading to King Phillip’s War, which was fought between 1675 and 1678.

BRIAN: Y’know, I can look to the fact that if it weren’t for the Wampanoag people, the Pilgrims never would have survived. As it was, they barely did. And they did in fact have a treaty of mutual protection but all of those classic elements of world history that involve war, conquering, invasion and violence… as we know, eventually did boil up to the surface. And, starting with King Phillip’s War right on up to Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, the Trail of Tears and so many other horrific events, violence would eventually win. So we’re definitely talking about a moment, a singular ephemeral moment in history where that wasn’t the case. People came here to start a new life with their families. It wasn’t men who started a trade mission like in Jamestown. It was actually people who were coming to better themselves, but not with the intent of pushing another people off their land. Everything gets very complicated after that first generation, but in the beginning that certainly was not the case.

But because of everything that happened thereafter it’s a very solemn occasion. Other moments as you know in world history are marred by violence and the will to advance one country’s self-interests in a foreign land, at the expense of course of the current occupants of said land. So I can easily see the multiple perspectives there are on the events of 1620 you know what I mean, and of course the years that immediately followed.

Brian and I get to talking about how Plymouth handled that balance when the town commemorated its tercentenary in 1920.

BRIAN: It really was a big deal, not just locally, not just state-wide, but on a national level! It was a point in time that they absolutely wanted to seize on. The president himself, who at that time was Warren G. Harding, made an appearance in Plymouth. And the way they had things set up was that 1920 was the year but some of the events carried over into 1921 where they were also honoring the first Thanksgiving, and when you say massive, the best example of that was this pageant they put on.

If you tuned in last episode, you got a front row seat to that pageant.

BRIAN: And that’s funny that word “Pageant,” is synonymous with going over and above, pageantry, and it was absolutely over and above (laughs). I think every other person in the town was called upon to be in this pageant that told the entire story of the Pilgrims. And believe it or not it didn’t gloss over certain aspects of it. It told the entire story of the stopping and starting that the Pilgrims had in England, about them going to Holland, about the time they spent there in Holland, about going from the Speedwell to Mayflower… EVERY aspect of it was all acted out. And it was massive, but what was the key difference, yes, there was inclusion, they did think to say let’s make sure the Native story is told. Sounds a lot like what I’m saying now.

But, it was inclusiveness as defined in 1920, so that unfortunately very, very sadly meant that when they called upon quote-unquote the Natives to be in the pageant that meant ‘Well alright let’s reach out to the Italians that have come over here to work in the rope factory, let’s reach out to the Portuguese immigrants – so the darker skinned folks to play the native people’. And there’s a picture of it at Pilgrim Hall. You can see this great picture of all the cast standing, and it’s pretty clear once you look at people beyond the regalia that they are indeed Southern European gentlemen playing male Native Americans. So that’s… a sad part of it. And that’s one thing that we are absolutely trying to do different. And I say trying, but it’s, to me, it’s effortless just to tell the story as it was.

Brian makes the casting of the tercentenary pageant sound like a long-ago buried secret, but I feel compelled to point out that this sounds like the kind of Thanksgiving pageant you’d see today in most primary schools, where we seem pretty okay with the whole “half of you will be Pilgrims, half of you will be Indians.”

BRIAN: I think about this a lot, because it’s how I grew up, especially growing up in Plymouth, there was always a reverence for – and for the purposes of this, I have to say – Indians. I went to a school called Indian Brook. Everything around me (here comes this word) celebrated what I thought were the Indians. So it always seemed to me very open and accepting as opposed to what I had been learning in school about this institutionalized racism against black people and the culture of segregation and so on and so forth. Never did we talk about that within this community. It was always about “Yeah let’s make sure the Indians are involved, let’s cut out a strip of colored paper and make the feathers and have the little crown.” And I talked about that today in fact with one of our volunteers, which we have a great group of volunteers, she was a kindergarten teacher. She’s the wokest kindergarten teacher you can imagine but she always made sure that her kids, that half of them were playing the Indians. But when she looks back on it, she cringes because of the way that they were depicted and the way that they were talking about it.

But at the same time her heart was there. So that’s something that I find myself thinking about a lot.

I think about it a lot too, and I bring up some of the hang-ups I had in researching and interpreting the Pilgrims. I’ve been upfront about that throughout this series, and it was definitely something I wanted to work through with Brian – was I inclined to scapegoat the Pilgrims, very white, very privileged, for reasons that had little to do with the Pilgrims themselves, and everything to do with what’s come after them?

BRIAN: Yeah so my case is that yours is one kind of reaction against what we’ve been taught, what you and I learned in school, the prevailing curriculum on this topic. And I for one and Plymouth 400 intend to influence changes to that, but we don’t look to dispatch with what’s been taught. I still think there’s incredible value in teaching about the odds that the Pilgrims fought against to get there and to take this unprecedented step.

Uh I think you really hit upon an interesting point in the Squanto episode because you talk about him being a children’s icon. And I think to some extent this whole story ends up in that category as well. ‘m stepping away form that bias and saying “I was that guy that used to kind of pooh-pooh it growing up” and I’m saying there are pieces of this that you can pull out and teach your children and your children’s children that really do resonate and I think will resonate forever. So I really do think about those next generations especially kids myself in that town. And I think about how they’re celebrating or commemorating as we first started talking about, this moment in history, this holiday of Thanksgiving. These people that came here. I think about that.

So we have things like the Indigenous History Conference that’s in 20202, it’s gonna be at Bridgewater State University. And that’s really going to take a deep dive into these people that had been here for thousands of years and what had they been doing before that now-romanticized day that people stepped out on Plymouth Rock. What went on after that?

And you explored that in depth with the abductions that happened before, with a lot of terrible terrible events. But things like out travelling exhibit which is called Our Story 400 years of Wampanoag history. And you had the great opportunity of meeting with Paula Peters, she’s so amazing, I’m so glad we could put that together. She’s an invaluable resource to us.

It’s something that you would really have to force into the curriculum and I think that’s what we’re trying to do, to change that conversation, to move the needle like I said before. We’re not gonna change the world, I talk about being ideological, this is the beginning of something. And you know what? Negative may come out of it. Someone may find fault. Someone finds fault in everything we post. But also, it’s opening it up, it’s opening up the conversation, and I really hope the conversation continues, because like we started talking about, we are ephemeral, we’re going to go away, we being Plymouth 400. But I hope the conversation continues, I hope the education continues, and I hope my children and your children continue to develop this and make their own history.

More of my conversation with Brian Logan, including how Plymouth is like Plymouth Rock and what about this story resonates with people who immigrated centuries after the Pilgrim, after a brief intermission and an exciting announcement.

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Iconography is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-centric collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts, and I emphasize Boston-CENTRIC because the newest show in our collective is made far from Beantown, though it is made near a Bean. Hub & Spoke is excited to welcome The Constant, a science and history podcast about getting things wrong that comes to us from Chicago-based playwright Mark Chrisler.

Mark recently released his 50th episode of The Constant, and it’s a very good companion for our discussion about Plymouth – in the Golden Episode, Mark entertainingly brings to life all the crazy and horrible things Spanish and English colonists did in the name of finding El Dorado, which it was abundantly clear, even way back then, was a myth. If you’ve been enjoying Iconography and you’ve never checked out The Constant, you are in for an absolute masterclass in historical storytelling if you take me up on my recommendation. You can check out The Constant at constantpodcast.com, at hubspokeaudio.org, or anywhere fine podcasts are available.

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I have a theory about Plymouth Rock. When I spoke to Brian Logan about Plymouth 400 at the beginning of my journey into the town’s early history, it was still a nascent theory but I tried it out on him anyway: as a means of transporting us back to 1620 and the first Pilgrim steps on these shores, Plymouth Rock is a bit of a dud, but as a metaphor for what a “living museum” town like Plymouth needs to go through to be what tourists expect it to be, it’s aces. Most people only see a small part of it, this meticulously cared for historical façade, but like a glacier, or erm a glacial erratic, there’s so much visitors don’t see below the surface and don’t even really think about.

But the part that everyone can see, well everyone wants a piece of that, it’s been torn in half.

This isn’t unique to Plymouth, but it’s especially notable in Plymouth, which needs to function as the fully-functioning community that it is, but also needs to tread carefully because every step potentially threatens a valuable piece of history, and even beyond that preservationist impulse needs to go a step further: it needs to seem like it’s been preserved in amber in order to play to what will make tourists feel they’ve got their money’s worth and might make them want to come again. Plymouth kind of needs to play dress-up to meet the expectations of its visitors.

So I put Brian on the spot, as an official representative of Plymouth – what is it like to be from, to live in a town that is a modern place filled with normal people living their lives to feel surrounded by or possible even subsumed by, well, the Plymouth Industrial Complex?

BRIAN: (laughs) I’ve never heard that.

It’s a really good question and it’s a loaded question for me because again I’m wearing two hats in this case, one of Plymouth 400 and one of a resident and a native of Plymouth.

Like the rock as you so eloquently point out, the area is indeed split into two or more camps, and everyone wants a piece of what they deem to be their Plymouth. And I’m personally of the radical opinion that it’s okay, y’know, it’s okay to have differing views on what he town should be and how the town should move forward. And I’ve seen this through growing up and now coming back here in a business capacity: there are those who would nothing more then ongoing historic preservation and an increase in services to Pilgrim-seekers everywhere. But hen there are those who live in Plymouth, know about the history but want to get to moving forward and get on with their life and stop fussing over all of this “Pilgrim stuff”.

The fact of the matter is though that tourism is the number one industry in the town and anything that caters to that can only improve its viability as a tourist destination and a great place to live. It’s funny because, again, not to harp on it, I grew up as one of those people…in Plymouth, taking it for granted. I knew about the history, but I really didn’t go downtown. If I went downtown, my parents were bringing me for ice cream. We drove past the tourists; we could always pick them out by their cameras hung around their neck. When I was a kid, believe it or not, we even took those field trips, I was five minutes down the road, but we would take trips to Plimoth Plantation. I really didn’t get all the fuss and was often surprised by this onslaught of tour busses and camera clicking visitors that were rushing to get a picture of the rock.

And I would often wonder, it’s funny you say you feel bad for the rock, that’s actually something that stuck with me since I was little, and only made worse in the advent of venues like the Travel Channel when it started getting listed on things like the top 10 most underwhelming tourist attractions. You know those kind of things hit close to home. I would feel very bad because… especially if you cruise down the waterfront and you approach the rock and you see a tourist just walking up you go OH NOOOOO they’re going to see it and they’re going to be underwhelmed.

But the thing is, it’s not a geological marvel, and that’s the problem. Language is holding it back there. In some ways I say that about Plymouth 400: language holds us back. We’re called Plymouth 400 because it’s of the center of operations if you will to get back to that corporate metaphor, but it’s not ab out Plymouth, its about a moment in history that changed the course of world history if I could go out on a limb.

This isn’t just a talking point for the leadership behind Plymouth 400 – they’re really backing this talk up by making sure the whole Cape, the whole state, the whole world are aligned as we approach the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims wild and strange trip.

BRIAN: That whole initial sort of exploration they did of (and I wish I could have a visual here of my arm making a fist – the shape that you can imagine of Cape Cod, they start out at the tip after being blown off course as again is well documented, and they don’t end up Plymouth Harbor very quickly! They of course sign the Mayflower Compact there, afloat, they come ashore in lots of different places along the Cape. And I think people forget that so some of the pieces of this commemoration of what Plymouth 400 is doing is linking those places together. So for instance we have a history trail. I liken it to the Freedom Trail but it is not walkable. So it really connects the dots between that initial arrival in what is Provincetown, brings you on up Cape Cod to Truro, which is the site of Corn Hill where they stole the cache of corn, First Encounter Beach in Eastham, and moving on up the Cape all the way to ultimately Plymouth. But no one’s really connected these places together before, so our trail that you’ll see more about and a tour also the official Plymouth 400 itinerary that international travelers, people from other parts of the country can take links these destinations together so people can finally get a feel for that journey that didn’t just start in England and end at Plymouth Rock where everybody jumped on land.

And yes, the English heritage of the Pilgrims is a big part of this as well. Brian is the one who connected me up with the Mayflower 400 organization in the UK, which was the focus of the Mayflower episode – they have their own trail that stretches from town to town, allowing visitors to explore what happened before the cross-Atlantic journey. This can be a sweeping, transatlantic thing, because, as Brian points out, what has traditionally been taught as a very linear journey, from Plymouth to Plymouth, was actually a saga full of starts and stops in multiple countries.

BRIAN: They could have turned back at any point along the way, we talk about those stops and starts. It’s pretty unbelievable when you put all the circumstances together that they finally made it. And that we’re still talking about them today.

This is where the song lyric quoting from the beginning of the episode comes in – they really do come up all the time, in popular culture. Admittedly, when I think of the Pilgrims place in the American songbook, I think of Cole Porter presaging “Anything Goes,” his song about Jazz Age excess, by musing how scandalized they would be by the culture of the present day.

(music) Times have changed And we’ve often rewound the clock Since the Puritans got a shock When they landed on Plymouth Rock. If today Any shock they should try to stem ‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock would land on them.

Which Malcolm X famously and devastatingly reworked in a 1964 speech:

MALCOLM X: Our forefathers weren't the Pilgrims. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will; we were not brought here to be made citizens…

And so, because I know it’s something Brian and the Plymouth 2020 team think about every day, I ask: What is it about this story that might resonate with people who would seem to be so far from what the Pilgrims represented? That makes the upcoming quadricentenary an event that speaks to all Americans (and non Americans), rather than to just Mayflower societies of Pilgrim descendants?

BRIAN: Those that are members of the societies that you talk about, the different family societies that regularly meet, that regularly have newsletters of which we’re in touch with many of them, they are certainly on board. This is their moment, this is their time to shine, and deservingly so. For better or worse it’s very personal and close to home for someone from Plymouth like myself or Mayflower descendants but they’re spread throughout the world.

But we all have different viewpoints. Those other folks whose families came to this country after Colonial times, y’know many of our friends and families who came at the turn of the century, our relatives or quote-unquote new immigrants after the Revolutionary War, after major periods in American history, after the Civil War, it resonates very differently.

But to those who are passionate about their own immigration story, it means something. Because if they connect the dots, you better believe that they’re seeing the fact that these people were escaping something and trying as I say to make a go of it in a new place.

This isn’t just a “Founders Day” story that rallies a town together and everyone gathers at the town gazebo, it ultimately is dare I say, the story of America’s founding. And we have reflections of this everywhere… I’m always seeing this in other examples. Just recently I was looking at some of our patriotic songs.

In “America” the song “America” sometimes called “My Country Tis of Thee”, in the very first verse we sing “…Land where my fathers died, Land of the pilgrims' pride, From ev'ry mountainside, Let freedom ring!”.

Same throughline in America the Beautiful:

BRIAN: O beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern, impassioned stress. A thoroughfare for freedom beat. Across the wilderness! America! America! La di da di da and so on and so forth

And again, it’s a song paying tribute no only to those first (uppercase “P”) Pilgrims but all future waves of pilgrims (lowercase “p”) who came to this country either seeking something to better themselves and their families or escaping something that was oppressing and, in many instances, doing great harm to them. Yes, the Portuguese and Italian immigrants who came to work at the Plymouth Cordage Company, they were not escaping the Church of England and it’s “papist” ways; they were indeed taking the risk to just start all over again in this country.

And that’s something that resonates with me as a child of English immigrants, French immigrants who came at the turn of the century, and in fact I don’t know if you mentioned this in that crowded landscape as you said of statues, there’s one that stands out in Brewster Gardens in Plymouth that is not, it doesn’t look like the other ones. It’s stainless steel and it captures the spirit of what I’m talking about here in a very lovely way. It’s that spirit of the future waves of immigrants.

That sculpture in Plymouth’s Brewster Gardens is I believe called the Plymouth Immigrant Monument. And it has an inscription and I have to pull this up which reads:

TO THE ENDURING MEMORY OF THOSE IMMIGRANT SETTLERS OF PLYMOUTH WHO AS LATTER DAY PILGRIMS FROM MANY CULTURES AND COUNTRIES OVER THE COURSE OF THREE CENTURIES HELPED BUILD UPON THESE SHORES A ROBUST AND HOSPITABLE COMMUNITY

AT GREAT PERSONAL SACRIFICE THEY ESTABLISHED NEW HOMES IN A NEW WORLD, AND, BY THEIR HARD WORK ENRICHED AND TRANSFORMED THIS TOWN, OF THEIR ADOPTION, PRECIOUS TO A GRATEFUL… so on and so forth.

Actually right here there’s some shrubbery that starts to cover up the thing, another thing that we should probably tidy up before 2020…

But nonetheless, so that’s only about 20 or so years old, but it’s really a great monument again to those future waves of immigrants, and when people ask me what does this mean to me, that’s what I point to. That’s who I point to is these future settlers these future people that came here kind of braving the New World, that’s how this original story of dare I say the first refugees to this country resonates now more than ever.

And it’s actually something that we’re theming our “Embarkation Festival” around, that’s on September of 2020 on the 19th and 20th. Honoring those future groups of immigrants that came here… and all future embarkations to the New World.

But anyway that particular event will be less about the commemoration of the events of 1620 like a lot of the other events are that we’re having, and it’s more about honoring these subsequent groups of pilgrims that shaped the area and in turn not just the area but the country.

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So there you have it, Iconographers. Let’s mark our calendars for September 19th and 20th, 2020, set a reminder on our phones, I’m doing that now – Embarkation, save – and I’ll see you in Plymouth, Massachusetts for the Embarkation Festival?

Iconography is written and produced by me, Charles Gustine. Thanks to Carol Zall for script editing and feedback.

In case you can’t make it to Plymouth in 2020, I hope this series of episodes on Plymouth has been a trip in its own right. If you’ve enjoyed the trip, I have a favor to ask. Tell me about it on iTunes or the podcast provider of your choice. I love to hear about your interactions with Iconography, and your ratings and reviews help other listeners find the show so they can join our tour before we head to our next destination. And the trip doesn’t have to end here either – we can keep the conversation going… on Twitter @iconographypod, on Instagram @iconographypodcast, and on Facebook at facebook.com/iconographypodcast.

And of course don’t leave our guest Brian Logan out of the conversation. You can keep up with what Plymouth 400 are doing in the leadup to 2020 by following Plymouth_400 on social media or visiting plymouth400inc.org.

Next episode, we leave Plymouth Rock and drive a few hours north on I-93 to visit another iconic, state-defining granite formation. Important caveat: it’s not there anymore, but what is is definitely worth our time. When we resume our tour, we’ll be in Franconia State Park in New Hampshire visiting the plaza that commemorates the Old Man of the Mountain.