America 250: America's First NIMBY Stopped a Wharf. Why Are We Still Doing This?
by Chris Moyer
As part of my America 250 road trip this summer, I drove through Plymouth, Massachusetts, and stopped at Plymouth Rock.
The Rock is smaller than you think, not much bigger than a coffee table. It weighs four tons today, down from ten, because visitors kept chipping off pieces as souvenirs. The date 1620 is carved into it, though that was added in 1880. There is an iron fence. People line up to look through it.
As someone who loves stories, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How this rather nondescript rock became one of America’s most enduring founding stories?”
The Pilgrims Never Mentioned the Rock
The two most detailed firsthand accounts of the Plymouth Colony are Edward Winslow's 1622 Mourt's Relation and William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. Between them, they cover the Mayflower voyage, the landing, the first winter, and the founding of the colony in remarkable detail. Neither mentions a rock. Not once.
The first written reference to Plymouth Rock in the town's own records, in 1715, describes it as “a great rock.” That was 95 years after the Pilgrims arrived, and the most specific description anyone had managed was “a great rock.”
The first documented claim that it was the actual landing spot came in 1741, 121 years after the Mayflower. A 94-year-old church elder named Thomas Faunce heard that the town was planning to build a wharf at the harbor. He asked to be carried in a chair three miles from his home to the waterfront. He wept. He told the crowd his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, three years after the Mayflower, had told him as a child that this specific rock was where the Pilgrims first came ashore.
The town was so moved that it built the wharf around the rock.
Daniel Webster gave an electrifying speech about it in 1820. A British poet named Felicia Hemans, who had never been to America, read about it in a Boston newspaper and wrote a poem that spread the legend across the English-speaking world. The rock has been broken, moved, reassembled, and moved again. The date 1620 was carved into it 260 years after the landing.
And here is the thing historians are fairly confident about: the Pilgrims almost certainly did not land on Plymouth Rock. They made their first North American landfall at the tip of Cape Cod, not at Plymouth. When they did reach Plymouth, they would have come ashore in a small boat in shallow water, stepping onto a beach, not clambering over a large boulder at the water's edge. Bill Bryson put it plainly: the practical difficulties of landing on a large rock rather than a beach make the story implausible on its face. The rock that stopped a wharf was almost certainly not the rock that defined a nation.
The wharf would have served the harbor. Plymouth was a working port. A wharf was exactly what it needed.
Plymouth Rock may or may not be where the Pilgrims landed. We genuinely cannot know. What we do know is that the national icon was born from a development fight.
One person, motivated by sentiment and an unverifiable inheritance of oral history, stopped a piece of useful infrastructure. And the story he told became one of the most famous in American history.
Thomas Faunce did not invent NIMBYism, but he helped create a cultural pattern that led people to oppose development.
285 Years Old and Still Running
In Michigan, 27 communities have passed moratoriums on data centers. A $1 billion project was withdrawn in Howell Township after local opposition organized against it. Sheetz, a convenience chain with more than 800 locations across seven states, took years to open its first Michigan store. Bill Ford stood at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids and said Michigan could not get out of its own way.
None of this is unique to Michigan. Across America, communities invoke neighborhood character to block apartments. Cities reject transit lines. Townships block wind farms. Historic preservation claims stop projects that have nothing to do with history. The instinct to protect the familiar from the new is not a conservative or liberal tendency. It crosses every partisan line. It shows up in wealthy suburbs and progressive cities, in rural counties and urban neighborhoods.
What makes the Plymouth Rock story so interesting is that a piece of American mythology also gave a playbook to future generations for how to stop development. The emotional argument gets there first. What this place means. What we would be losing. The practical argument arrives later, with traffic studies and tax revenue projections, and it arrives on the defensive. The emotional argument almost always wins, not because it is right, but because it was first.
Faunce was carried three miles to weep over a rock. The people who would have used the wharf had no comparable moment. That asymmetry is baked into how community opposition works, and it has been since before there was a United States.
This year’s America 250 commemoration is an invitation to take stock of who we actually are, not just the inspiring version of the story but the patterns that have shaped us across 250 years, including the ones that work against us.
The search for a more perfect union is not just about rights and representation. It is about whether we can build the things a growing country needs. Housing. Infrastructure. Energy. The institutions and investments that let people live better lives. All of those things require someone, somewhere, to accept that something new is coming to their neighborhood. And we have never been particularly good at it. Two hundred and fifty years in, we are still working on that one.