For town birthday, foresight is 2020

The Queen of England came to visit, the state Legislature met there, 63,000 tourists dropped by one weekend last month, and government and private donors invested tens of millions of dollars in the milestone gala that was Jamestown's 400th anniversary celebration.

It's a tough act for America's other first settlement -- Plymouth -- to follow.

While no one knows yet what Plymouth's 400th anniversary celebration, in 2020, will look like, town leaders say that given what Jamestown did, it's not too soon to start planning.

Last week, selectmen instructed Town Manager Mark Sylvia to contact state and local leaders to discuss planning the town's 400th celebration.

Plymouth leaders say the attention paid to Jamestown has focused renewed interest in their town's historical claims. Officials have received media calls from national news organizations such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, Sylvia said, because Jamestown's selling points made frequent reference to Plymouth.

For example: "The very essence of modern America took root on the banks of the James River in 1607, at Jamestown, Virginia," declares the website of Jamestown 2007, a major promoter of the milestone celebration, before adding, "13 years before the Pilgrims founded Plymouth in Massachusetts."

But Plymouth is less impressed with Jamestown's claims on American history than with the planning model that coordinated the celebration, making it a state and regional event drawing in other communities and funding sources. Planners attracted private partners, set up a foundation to tie in school programs, and secured federal participation and funds for site development work.

"We recognize that part of their success was that Virginia started planning many years in advance," said Sylvia. "We're 13 years out."

In 1996, Sylvia said, Virginia created a state agency that was to promote Jamestown's 400th, along with a nonprofit subagency (Jamestown 2007) that had the right to accept private donations. Congress created a national commission to promote the event. The National Park Service, which operates sites in Jamestown, though not in Plymouth, spent money on improvements.

One of the lessons Plymouth draws from its rival's example is starting early.

"We're probably taking the same type of route they did 11 years ago," said Denis Hanks, director of the Plymouth Area Chamber of Commerce who met last week with Sylvia and an assistant to state Senate president Therese Murray, the Democrat who represents Plymouth. "And we'll probably experience the same kind of friendly rivalry with Jamestown."

Hanks also said promoting Plymouth's 400th anniversary might help advance the town's desire for a national park designation like that enjoyed by communities such as New Bedford, a local-federal partnership in which the park service would maintain a presence -- and provide promotional money -- on site in Plymouth.

Local officials also are hoping the state will kick in promotional money. Monica Mullin, Murray's assistant, said her office is reviewing the Jamestown model with an eye to what can be done to get funding and "raise the [town's] profile a little bigger."

Planning could go beyond national borders. Peggy Baker, director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, noted the Pilgrims' connections with England and the Netherlands. Representatives from the Mayflower's home port of Southwark, the maritime district of London on the south bank of the Thames, already have been to Plymouth to meet with tourism leaders to stake out a role in 2020. The English partners, Baker said, plan to do some "preanniversary educational programming so children will understand" the historical roots of the colony.

Town leaders said the 400th celebration will provide an opportunity to tell the town's story -- a different one from that of Jamestown. While both settlements had specific impacts on the founding of America, Sylvia said, "the missions were distinct." The Pilgrims were members of a dissenting religious congregation looking for a permanent home for their families away from Old World authority. Jamestown was settled mainly by adventurers looking for a way to acquire wealth in the New World.

Plymouth also can claim to be "the oldest continuous English-speaking settlement" in America, Sylvia said, pointing out that the initial Jamestown settlement was abandoned (though the Virginia colony continued on a different site), while people are still living today in Plymouth where the Pilgrims lived in 1620.

While playing down the importance of that distinction, Baker said that Jamestown's abandonment of its earliest settlement allows for archeological digs at that site that are not possible in Plymouth. "You can't dig up Leiden Street," she said, referring to the first street in the Pilgrim settlement that is still part of the town center.

Baker said the way to tell the Plymouth story is to draw links between their experience and our own. "You have to link what happened in 1620 to what's happening today."

Because Plymouth was the first English colony to include women, Baker has an idea for one theme for Plymouth's 400th celebration: "The history of American women."

Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.