I like to think of the men in the first part of this story as just a bunch of dudes, just a bunch of dudes doing dude things. Someone has an idea (probably while drinking). The year is 1774. It is the eve of the Revolutionary War. The place is Plymouth, Massachusetts. They have recently organized a militia there. They have put up a liberty pole, which is essentially just that: a big wooden pole. But it is, of course, more than just that. It is a symbol of defiance against the Crown, a metaphoric middle finger, rising from the town green.

The liberty pole tradition traces its roots to ancient Rome, where a group of senators celebrated the emperor’s assassination by sticking a red cap on top of a pole. The cap was the same type that was given to freed slaves to signal their new status; the senators, it seems, co-opted the cap to suggest that Rome, with Caesar’s death, had been similarly freed. Then, during the Renaissance, when everything Ancient Rome was new again, people revived the concept and refreshed it for a new era, turning it into a more generalized symbol of liberty, one that could be carried or rallied around as necessary, eventually bringing us to the poles that popped up all over New England on the eve of the American Revolution, and from there back to the dudes in Plymouth.

The Memory Palace

By Nate DiMeo. Random House.

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They want to do the other towns with their red-floppy-cap-capped poles one better. This is Plymouth, after all, founded 154 years earlier by people who famously fled English oppression. A regular pole isn’t going to do. The next morning a “large number gathers” (that is as specific as the historical record gets on this) on the town green with oxen and the biggest cart they can find, and they head down to the shore to dig up Plymouth Rock and put it on top of the Liberty Pole. That will show them.

I like to think it wasn’t just the transatlantic journey of the Mayflower in 1620 that led those men down to that shore with shovels in hand, but another, much shorter trip. That one took place in 1741, when a man named Thomas Faunce heard they were planning on building a new wharf on the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce was 95, which is plenty old now, but which back then was truly extraordinary. And when he heard about the wharf plan, he was bereft because that wharf was going to cover up what we now know as Plymouth Rock. By all accounts, the very first time anyone mentions any rock in conjunction with the Pilgrims landing comes in 1741, 120 years after they landed, thanks to Thomas Faunce.

His father had arrived in Plymouth on a ship called the Anne a few years after the Mayflower. It being a very small community, Thomas’ dad was pals with the original Pilgrims, and one day when Thomas was a little boy, twenty-some years after their arrival and after the first winter and first Thanksgiving and all that, his dad pointed out to the water’s edge and said, “See that rock? That’s where Myles Standish and all of them first........

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