The John Alden House Historic Site in Duxbury, where the Pilgrim John Alden and his descendants lived for almost 300 years, is on its way to gaining National Historic Landmark status.
The National Historic Landmarks Committee paved the way this month with a favorable recommendation, making a National Historic Landmark designation all but certain sometime next year.
The designation is awarded to historic sites that prove their national historic and cultural importance. While it brings with it new prestige, it does not lead to other changes, although it could eventually enhance opportunities for grant fund-raising.
The designation would put the Alden House in some exclusive company.
It would join just a handful of area sites, including Cole's Hill in Plymouth, The Daniel Webster Law Office in Marshfield, the General Benjamin Lincoln House in Hingham, and Old Ship Meeting House, also in Hingham.
The committee's recommendation was based on an extensive application prepared by history professor Tom McCarthy of the Naval Academy, an Alden descendant.
"Tom carried the ball," said Alden Ringquist of Duxbury, director of the Alden Kindred of America, which owns the site.
The John Alden House Historic Site consists of a house and barn, built around 1700 by John Alden's son or grandson, and the nearby original Alden homestead, the remains of the first house built by Alden in Duxbury, around 1630. Both parcels were part of the 1628 100-acre grant to Mayflower passenger John Alden and his family, awarded when the Pilgrim colony in Plymouth divided its property among members.
Alden and his wife, Priscilla, then left the original Plymouth village for their new Duxbury home, which McCarthy called "America's first suburban development."
The site's Alden connection is of national significance because "no other physical site is so prominently linked with specific Mayflower passengers," McCarthy said.
The long-lived Alden (1598-1687) was an important figure in Plymouth Colony throughout his life, holding every public office but governor and serving as acting governor on several occasions.
Beyond Alden's public status, McCarthy states in his application that the Alden property owes its prominence to the national cultural impact of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," one of the most popular poems in American history. Written in 1858 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - America's first homegrown literary sensation and at one point the most popular poet in the English-speaking world - the poem narrates the romantic approach of Pilgrim Miles Standish to Priscilla Mullins.
Alden was asked to act as go-between by Standish, the Pilgrims' military leader, in presenting his proposal to Priscilla. The poem's big moment comes when Priscilla replies, "Speak for yourself, John." Alden did, acknowledging his own feelings for Priscilla, and the rest is literature - what McCarthy called "the most popular national origins story in American folklore."
The poem owed its popularity, McCarthy said, to 19th-century Americans' longing for "a more human, family-focused story about the cultural and historical origins" of their country. The Alden House's connection to the popular Pilgrim romance put it on the map for tourists. Heightening the site's connection to the story, the couple's descendants continued to live in and own the house into the 20th century, when it was acquired by the newly formed Alden Kindred in 1907.
The original 17th century home site, where John and Priscilla Alden lived with their children, was the location of important fieldwork by Roland Wells Robbins, adding to its national stature. In 1960, Robbins, a pioneer in historical archeology best known for his work on Thoreau's Walden Pond cabin site, excavated the foundation and found an early structure of unusually narrow dimensions, atypical of Colonial America, McCarthy said. The dig yielded "one of the largest collections of Colonial artifacts dating to the 1630s," shedding light on the everyday life of the first English settlers in North America.
Located at 105 Alden St., The Alden House, a substantial home built by John and Priscilla's descendants, is the best place to learn how "a national origins story that rapidly became part of American folklore" intersected in the latter 19th century with Americans' need to rediscover their own ancestral roots, McCarthy wrote.
The Alden descendants' success in celebrating their "immigrant forebears" is one of the reasons the house deserves national landmark status, he said.
The National Historic Landmarks Committee's recommendation on landmark status has to be approved by the National Park System's advisory board and the Department of the Interior. McCarthy said he expects official notice by June, when the Alden House will once again be open to visitors.
Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.
