90 Samoset Avenue, Quincy
The Maypole likely originated in 16th century folk festivals in Germany and Austria and has roots in pagan rituals. Its first use in what became the United States was on May 1, 1627, in what is today Quincy.
On that date, Thomas Morton and his men set up an 80-foot-long pine pole in the midst of their small trading post and settlement called Merry Mount, drinking and dancing around it with Native women invited to join them. Morton was a free-thinking and -acting English settler who had arrived in the region only two years earlier as a partner in a private colonization effort led by Captain Wollaston (after whom part of Quincy is named).
Morton’s settlement only numbered seven individuals. Nonetheless, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony saw it as threat. They arrested him in 1628, officially for selling weapons and gun powder to local Indians, cut down the maypole, and deported him to England. A little more than a year later, Morton returned to the area only to see the Puritans of the newly established Massachusetts Bay Colony arrest him on spurious charges, confiscate his property, and banish him again to England. More than a decade later, Morton returned a second time and was imprisoned—under brutal conditions. Upon release a year later, he was in very poor health and died soon thereafter.
Whatever the official justifications for arresting, jailing, and exiling Morton, the true reasons concerned his refusal to conform to the conservative social, religious, ecological and sexual mores of the English colonists. Whereas the English tended to see the land as uninteresting, barren or threatening and in need of conquest, Morton, who wrote the first natural history of the colony, celebrated its wildness and abundance. Similarly, he rejected the dominant perception of his Indian neighbors as cruel and barbarous, characterizing them instead as “full of humanity” and “more friendly” than his fellow colonists. At the same time, Morton was a sexual libertine who had little respect for colonial orthodoxy. In addition to embracing relations outside of marriage, he also celebrated sexual liaisons between Native people and the English, while suggesting openness to same-sex relationships. Indeed, the English castigated Morton for engaging in “sodomy” and “buggery.”
The City of Quincy’s official seal commemorates Thomas Morton’s trading post site. A marker in Maypole Hill Park in Quincy’s Merrymount neighborhood indicates the location of Morton’s Maypole. In recent years, revelers have gathered there each around May Day to celebrate Morton’s memory and free-wheeling ways.
Getting there:
Red Line to Quincy Center Station. MBTA buses pass a few blocks away from the site.
To learn more:
- Drinnon, Richard. “The Maypole of Merry Mount: Thomas Morton & the Puritan Patriarchs,” The Massachusetts Review 21, no. 2 (1980): 382-410.
- Zuckerman, Richard. “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” The New England Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1977): 255-277.
Image: Morris dancers carry the Maypole up Maypole Hill in Quincy, May 10, 2008. Courtesy of the Patriot Ledger.