Provincetown: Pilgrims Landed Here First

Provincetown, Mass., wants you to know: The Pilgrims landed here first. Sure, the fresh water was lacking, the sand not so great for growing things, and the Native Americans were a bit scary, causing them to move a few weeks later to Plymouth—the same Plymouth that gets all the tourist dollars and fame as the place our forefathers supposedly first set foot. This is a situation P-town urgently wants to change, reports the Boston Globe, and it's launched a campaign to restore its deserved glory.

“Support America’s history: It all started here,’’ trumpets the town's slogan. P-town's initiative is one of many that have failed to win it a place in America's hearts and minds, including the construction, 100 years ago, of a granite tower called Pilgrim Monument. In the mid-20th-century, poet Henry Kemp sent little bottles of sand to every state governor with the couplet, “Not on Plymouth Rock but on Provincetown Sand; The Pilgrim Fathers first came to land.’’ This also failed. Nonetheless, claim local officials, “Important things happened here, and we should remember that.’’
(More Thanksgiving stories.)