Piece of Plymouth Rock is offered on eBay
There are Plymouth Rock commemorative plates. Plymouth Rock salt and pepper shakers. A Plymouth Rock woolen rug. Even a 49-year-old volume of ”The Bobbsey Twins at Plymouth Rock.”
The eBay website abounds with kitschy knickknacks celebrating the hunk of granite at the edge of Plymouth Harbor, where the Mayflower Pilgrims supposedly landed in 1620. But soon, in an auction scheduled to last from this Thursday to Thanksgiving, buyers on the giant Internet auction site will be able to buy an actual piece of the Rock or so a seller from Cape Cod said.
The seller, who insisted on anonymity for fear of overzealous buyers showing up on his Orleans doorstep, said that the rock is not very big. It’s a glorified chip, really, smaller than a deck of cards. But he insisted that it is genuine, a curiosity passed down to him by the late lawyer for an early-20th-century geologist who said he had gotten it from a director of the Pilgrim Society.
That society donated Plymouth Rock and the land it sits on to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1920.
The rock comes in a small gray box, the seller said, with the business card of that Pilgrim Society director, with an ink inscription: ”A bit of Plymouth Rock taken from the original about 1858.”
The seller said that the rock has been sitting in his desk for 30 years, and that he recently decided to get rid of it, with some of the other collectibles he has accumulated over the years. He said he hopes that a person who can appreciate it perhaps someone associated with a museum will see it and snap it up.
Actually, he needs two people who can appreciate it. ”It takes two to make an auction,” he said.
The seller said that he isn’t setting a price for the object, and that he has no idea how much it might bring.
”It could bring $25, it could bring $2,500,” he said. ”Who knows? You have nothing to go by.”
Peggy Baker, the executive director of the Pilgrim Society and the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, said she, too, could not estimate its value. Even though a piece of Plymouth Rock about the size of a large marble went for several hundred dollars in a charity auction for the museum a few years ago, she said that ”hundreds, if not thousands” of fragments of the rock have made their way far from the Massachusetts coast.
She also said that the seller’s rock is impossible to authenticate, beyond verifying that, like Plymouth Rock, it is made of Dedham granite, which she said is unusual for the Plymouth area.
”It’s like anything that’s a memento,” she said. ”They’re worth what somebody’s willing to pay for them.”
No one is entirely sure if Plymouth Rock is exactly where the Pilgrims landed. The Pilgrims never mentioned the rock in their writings, Baker said. It wasn’t until more than a century later that a First Church of Plymouth elder, Thomas Faunce, proclaimed the rock’s significance to townspeople in 1741, said Baker.
Faunce, who was 90 when he made the claim, had some credibility, though, because he knew some of the original pilgrims as a boy, Baker said.
In any case, the current rock is much smaller than it used to be. In 1774, when the local Sons of Liberty tried to drag it from the shore to the liberty pole in the town square, it split in half.
Over time, bits broke off, souvenir hunters took pieces, the Smithsonian Institution and the Pilgrim Hall museum got large hunks, and even a few towns in the Western United States asked for pieces to embed in the cornerstones of their town halls, Baker said.
Many families in the Plymouth area have their own fragments of the rock, too, including Baker and her husband, who keep a fragment the size of a fist in a curiosity cabinet, next to a Waterford crystal vase and an ancient Roman coin.
”Every once in a while you go and look at it, and you stop and smile,” she said.
David Hillier, an antiques dealer from West Townsend who specializes in American objects dating from the 16th to middle 18th centuries, believes the piece about to be sold on eBay is not worth much.
”It’s akin to me cutting some hair off the top of my head what little is left and saying ‘This is Abraham Lincoln’s hair,’ ” Hillier said.
”I would think anybody with a methodical approach to buying [antiquities] is not going to put any money on it,” Hillier said.
”But then again,” he added, ”crazy stuff is sold on eBay for an awful lot of money.”
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