Tourists from Kansas City, Mo., who declined to give their names snapped a photo of Plymouth Rock last week.
(Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)
PLYMOUTH - Tourists coming next spring to see the most famous symbol of America's founding could be in for a bit of a shock: Plymouth Rock will be hidden in a box.
Not forever. But as state parks officials begin a $680,000 overhaul of the granite and steel portico built over the remains of the rock where legend holds that Colonial governor William Bradford and fellow Pilgrims first walked ashore from the Mayflower in 1620, they will be encasing Plymouth Rock in a reinforced plywood box. It will stay that way from roughly March 1 through the end of May as masons go to work fixing the portico overhead. Officials don't want any falling stone, mortar, or steel further damaging the famous rock.
Plymouth Rock has suffered enough. Cracked in half when townspeople working a team of oxen tried to move it to the village center in 1774, the piece of the rock that got moved ashore got more fractures in 1834 during a move to Plymouth's Pilgrim Hall Museum.
Throughout the nation's first century, souvenir hunters chipped away at the rock, slivers of which have wound up as far away as Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nev. In 1880, when the roving half of the rock was reunited with the piece left at the shore of Plymouth Harbor and the date 1620 carved into it, more pieces were chopped off to make it fit under a canopy.
"We want to protect the rock and be very careful with what's left of the rock," said state Senate President Therese Murray, a Democrat from Plymouth who helped push through state funding for the project. "We don't need something falling on it."
The portico, completed in 1921 as part of the tricentennial celebration of the pilgrims' arrival to Massachusetts, was designed by McKim, Mead and White, the architectural firm that designed the main Boston Public Library in Copley Square.
In recent years, weather and exposure to salt water have inflicted extensive damage on the portico. Parks workers have had to install netting to keep terra cotta tiles in the vault of the ceiling from dropping on the rock. Damaged tiles will be repaired and replaced as part of next spring's work, which will be managed by Boston architects Bargmann Hendrie + Archetype.
Rehabilitation of the venerable memorial will also involve some cutting-edge technology. To keep the portico from further rust, crews will install a so-called cathodic protection system, which injects a low flow of electricity, about the equivalent of an AA battery, into the steel frame of the portico to counteract the chemical reaction that produces rust. Higher-powered cathodic protection systems are often used on bridges and pipelines to prevent rust.
Richard K. Sullivan Jr. - commissioner of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, which manages the Plymouth park - said officials are choosing to do the work in late winter and early spring, when visits to the rock drop off.
"One of the things that was important here was the timing of the construction so it could be back open again for tourism in the summer," Sullivan said. Depending on the work underway each day, visitors to the park are likely to find not just the rock covered in a box but the portico itself shut off behind barriers, Sullivan said.
The Pilgrim Memorial State Park - which includes the rock and portico, a small museum, and a pier for a floating replica of the Mayflower - draws more than 1 million visitors annually, mostly in warm weather and around Thanksgiving, state officials say.
Despite the veneration the rock has received over the years, historians have long held that scant proof exists that it was the place where the Pilgrims walked ashore in Plymouth in December 1620 after exploring and rejecting Provincetown.
It wasn't until 1741 that the rock on the shore of Plymouth Harbor was declared to be the Plymouth Rock by a 94-year-old church elder named Thomas Faunce. He said his father had told him decades earlier it was the place where the Pilgrims first walked ashore. But in his copious journals and personal papers, Bradford never made any reference to the rock, nor did other Plymouth colonists, historians have noted.
But Sullivan said parks officials are thrilled they finally have the money to care for a site that, whatever its origins, has become a national treasure.
"Everybody here is so excited to be able to do this," Sullivan said, "because they know this is really an icon."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
