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Page: Profile: Wren's Nest News Local
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Article: 20600
[History]
Date Posted:
5/4/2009
12:05:21 pm EDT
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Essex County Chronicles: May-Pole Celebrations Once Banned In Salem
Author: Jim McAllister Source: Salem News (MA)
Title: ESSEX COUNTY CHRONICLES: MAY-POLE CELEBRATIONS ONCE BANNED IN SALEM
"It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May," sings one of the characters in the legendary Broadway play "Camelot." And for John Endicott, the first governor of Massachusetts and Salem's most important citizen, that was just the problem he was facing in the spring of 1629.
Shortly after his arrival at Salem the previous summer, the new governor had become aware of Merry Mount, a renegade settlement at Wollaston (now Quincy) led by Thomas Morton. The inhabitants were providing the Native Americans in the area with guns and liquor and even selling some of them as slaves in Virginia. They also routinely participated in drunken bacchanals in the shadow of an 80-foot-high May-pole.
The May-pole ritual was rooted in pagan traditions, and partly for that reason it was eventually outlawed in Protestant England and by the sober, hard-line Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the late 1620s. Because the ongoing Merry Mount celebrations and the culture they represented threatened the mores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and because Wollaston lay within the boundaries of the colony, Gov. Endicott decided to take corrective action against Morton and his fellow "heathens."
In May of 1629 Endicott led an armed force southward to Wollaston. Traveling most likely by water, the Puritans made quick work of the illicit goings-on shortly after their arrival. Endicott's men stopped the celebration and then gleefully toppled the offensive May-pole.
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