Excerpt from Old Plymouth Days and Ways, And, Red Men in the Massachusetts Colonies: Eighteenth Century Celebrations of the Landing of the Pilgrims

Prior to the middle of the three centuries of Pilgrim and Plymouth history in New England, an occasional sermon or ad dress was delivered at some meeting house in the town and from 1774 to 1780, inclusive, addresses were delivered under the auspices of the town, also from 1794 to 1820. In the latter year the Pilgrim Society took the initiative, and has continued in charge of celebra tions since then. The Old Colony Club, organized in 1769, gave the first Plymouth celebration, in that year. There was a considerable Loyalist element in this Club which caused it sharply to resent the invitation of the Committee of Safety and Correspondence of the town to hold a joint celebration in 1773. The Club dined by itself on the anniversary of the Landing that year and disbanded on the outbreak of the Revolution. But it held the first celebration in the Pilgrims' town of the Pilgrims' Landing, the date being Friday, twenty-second December, 1769.

James Cole appeared in Plymouth, 1633, and either he or his son built the first house on the bluff overlooking the Rock, ever since called Cole's Hill, where the bodies of many of the Pilgrims who died the first winter - 1620-21 - were buried. He kept a tav ern from 1645 to 1660, and was succeeded in the business by his son, James. A daughter of the latter, Joanna, married Thomas Howland, son of Joseph and grandson of Pilgrim John. A son of Thomas Howland and grandson of James Cole, Jr., Consider How land, also kept an inn, which was quite noted in the early eighteenth century and his son, Thomas Southworth Howland, followed in the same business, his inn being in North Street, while that of his father and the Coles was in Leyden Street, James Cole, Sr., having bought the house built by Governor Winslow, where he was licensed in 1645 to keep an ordinary, visited by Judge Samuel Sewall in 1698 and described by him as the oldest house in Plymouth. It was at the inn kept by Thomas Southworth Howland, in North Street, that the first celebration of Forefathers' Day was held. The records of the short-lived Old Colony Club, under date of twenty-second De cembor, 1769, mention the in as on the site of James Cole's first tavern, which is shown by Plymouth Titles of Estates to be an error. These Club records say.

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