Forefathers’ Day, observed on December 21 nowadays, began as a genteel celebration of the Pilgrims’ landing but soon turned into a political tug-of-war in Plymouth on the eve of the American Revolution. The holiday’s origin in 1769 was straightforward enough: a private club’s tribute to “our worthy ancestors.” Yet within a few years, Forefathers’ Day became the focal point of a feud between Patriots and Loyalists, each side vying to claim the legacy of the Pilgrims. What started as a convivial dinner ended up foreshadowing the coming split of a nation.

It began in January 1769, when a handful of young elite gentlemen in Plymouth founded the Old Colony Club. They were mostly Harvard-educated sons of prominent families, seeking refined companionship “to avoid the many disadvantages and inconveniences that arise from intermixing with the company at the taverns” (as they put it).[1] From the outset, politics wasn’t supposed to be on the menu; fellowship and heritage were. But in a short time these influential young men would split (almost evenly) between two political camps.

Their signature idea was to commemorate the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims with an annual feast. Thus “Forefathers’ Day” was born. The very first celebration took place on December 22, 1769 (their calculation of the date, converting the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, turned out to be a day off but no one seemed to much mind the error). On that day, the members held a brief ceremony during which a cannon was fired (a practice still observed by the Club today), then  gathered in the inn of Mr. Thomas Southworth Howland (later a Loyalist) where they sat down to a “decent repast” of Pilgrim-inspired dishes.[2]

The Club’s president sat in an antique chair that had belonged to Governor William Bradford (now in Pilgrim Hall Museum), and after the feast they raised toasts to the forefathers’ memory.[3] The entire observance informs us that these young men of Plymouth in 1769 revered their Pilgrim ancestors for both their love of liberty and their loyalty as British subjects. Unity and harmony reigned.

Over the next few years, Forefathers’ Day settled into Plymouth’s calendar as an annual ritual. The Old Colony Club repeated the celebration each December 22, embellishing it with small but meaningful flourishes—a modest procession in 1770, followed by a sermon or formal oration. Yet by 1772, the Club’s social world was beginning to overlap uncomfortably with Plymouth’s political life. Many of its leading members now sat on the town’s newly formed Committee of Correspondence, created to exchange letters with Boston and neighboring towns as Parliament asserted what many colonists viewed as unprecedented and dangerous powers.

Increasingly, the Committee did more than merely correspond: it articulated Whig, or Patriot, policy for Plymouth itself. Club president Isaac Lothrop and his brother Thomas, the Club’s secretary, were among its members, joined by Club members such as James Warren, William Watson, Deacon John Torrey, Thomas Mayhew, and Dr. Lazarus LeBaron. At the same time, other members were hardening in the opposite direction, embracing loyalism with growing conviction—most notably Edward Winslow Jr., Gideon White, George Watson, and Thomas Southworth Howland.

The year 1773 brought the imperial crisis to a head. Parliament’s Tea Act and the impending arrival of East India Company tea in Boston lit a fuse among Patriots throughout Massachusetts. In Plymouth, James Warren (a prominent Patriot who chaired the town’s Committee of Correspondence) became more assertive in pushing the Old Colony Club to line up behind the American cause. The Loyalists members resisted and eventually, as noted in the Club’s minutes of November 1773, the Patriot members ceased attending.[4]

Until one November evening in 1773 when three men of the Patriot faction—James Warren, John Torrey, and Thomas Jackson—showed up unexpectedly at an Old Colony Club meeting. They announced that they represented the town’s Committee of Correspondence, and they coolly “informed this Club of the determination of said Committee…relative to the celebration of the next 22d of December,” essentially telling the Club to step aside. The Committee had decreed that they would henceforth organize and oversee the upcoming Forefathers’ Day observance, and they “requested that the Club would join with and conform thereto.”[5]

In other words: Thank you, gentlemen, for inventing this lovely tradition—we’ll take it from here. The young Loyalists were stunned and furious. From their perspective, an external political committee (even one populated by some Club members) had no right to hijack the Forefathers’ Day festivity. They also feared the Committee of Correspondence would turn Forefathers’ Day into a partisan rally laden with anti-British messages.

The Loyalist members quickly drafted a fierce response. Twenty-six-year-old Edward Winslow Jr. took the lead. Winslow was a direct descendant of Pilgrim Edward Winslow and had been a driving force in creating the Old Colony Club in 1769. Ambitious and proud, he saw himself as a guardian of Plymouth’s heritage. He was also, by upbringing, a staunch Tory. In an indignant letter addressed to the Committee of Correspondence, the Loyalist Club members acknowledged the Committee’s role in coordinating inter-town political communication but “absolutely deny[ied] your jurisdiction and authority” over a local anniversary celebration.[6]

The Committee, they insisted, had been created simply “to communicate and correspond with the town of Boston and other towns” on public affairs. As for private social affairs, “We apprehend that your constituents had no idea or suspicion of your interfering in these [affairs]… It appears to us that you have no right to meddle with…any civil, religious, or military matter that has or may arise within our town,” Winslow’s group proclaimed. Such “partial and extra-judicial” actions by the Committee would only “promote parties and divisions (which have already too long harassed and convulsed this once peaceful town), rather than… concord and harmony so necessary in the welfare of all societies.”[7]

The political rift that had been creeping into Plymouth life was now laid bare in ink—and the Loyalists squarely blamed the Patriots for tearing the community apart. This sharp rebuttal was not well-received by the Patriot majority in town. On December 7, 1773, at a Plymouth town meeting led by James Warren, the townspeople had already voted to formally oppose the Tea Act and any landing of tea, calling such British measures “dangerous to that liberty which our fathers claimed and enjoyed and which we have the right to enjoy.” In this charged atmosphere, Winslow’s Loyalist protest was like throwing gunpowder on a fire. And Winslow only increased the temperature when he tried to present a Loyalist Petition at the December 13, 1773 Town Meeting. The meeting voted that Winslow could not read it, shutting the Loyalists down.[8]

Undeterred, Winslow sent his petition of protest off to Boston for publication. Unfortunately for him and his co-signers, it hit the press right after news of the Boston Tea Party broke. On December 20, 1773, Boston newspapers ran the petition in which Winslow and company claimed it was their duty to oppose the town’s “dangerous” resolves, and even sneered at the Sons of Liberty as “a sett of cursed, venal, worthless Rascals.”[9] The timing could not have been worse for Plymouth’s Loyalists and they became increasingly ostracized.

And now Forefathers’ Day 1773 was mere days away. Plans had already been set in motion months before including an invitation to the Rev. Charles Turner (a Patriot-friendly minister from Duxbury) to give the oration. Now stuck with a preacher they suspected might preach liberty from the pulpit, despite their simmering misgivings, the remaining Club members went ahead with the 1773 Forefathers’ Day observance, this time under the watchful eye of the Patriot Committee of Correspondence.

Following this observance, the Old Colony Club effectively collapsed (it was eventually reconstituted in 1883). In the months and years that followed, the former club members went their separate ways. Several of the Old Colony Club’s young Patriots soon rose to prominence in the Revolutionary cause. Many of the Loyalists met harsh fates, forced to flee first to the protection of the British Army in Boston, and later to Nova Scotia when the British evacuated. The struggle over Forefathers’ Day was a microcosm of the American Revolution itself: former friends and cousins split apart over principles, each convinced they upheld the true legacy of the forefathers. And in Plymouth, the Patriots won the legacy war.

Looking back, the Forefathers’ Day conflict of 1773 in Plymouth is a striking example of how history itself became political weaponry. Patriots and Loyalists alike claimed to be the true heirs of the Pilgrims’ legacy. The struggle over who “owned” Forefathers’ Day and Plymouth Rock led to a local civil war of words—and nearly of blows. And when revolution came, the Patriots prevailed not only politically but in memory as well.

What began as a genteel club dinner became a rallying point for liberty, and when Plymouth Rock split during the Patriots’ 1774 attempt to move it (that’s another story for another time), many saw in the fracture a fitting omen: one shared past giving way to two sharply divided futures. Forefathers’ Day endures today as a moment of heritage rather than faction, but its origins remind us that the meaning of history is forged through contest.

---

[1] William S. Russell, Pilgrim Memorials and Guide for Visitors to Plymouth Village: With a Lithographic Map (Boston: J. Howe, 1851), 92.

[2] Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 18 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1915), 298.

[3] James Thacher, History of the Town of Plymouth: From Its First Settlement in 1620, to the Year 1832 (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1832), 181.

[4] Mary Blauss Edwards, “1773 Tensions in Plymouth’s Old Colony Club,” Of Graveyards and Things (blog), December 20, 2019, https://ofgraveyardsandthings.com/2019/12/20/1773-tensions-in-plymouths-old-colony-club/

[5] Thacher, 193.

[6] Thacher, 193.

[7] Thacher 194.

[8] Plymouth (Mass.), Records of the Town of Plymouth: 1743 to 1783, ed. William Thomas Davis (Plymouth, MA: Town of Plymouth, 1903), 281–282.

[9] Chaim M. Rosenberg, “Rascally Cousins: Whig or Tory in America’s Mother Town,” Journal of the American Revolution (blog), December 4, 2017, accessed December 21, 2025, https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/12/rascally-cousins-whig-tory-americas-mother-town/