Historic Plymouth (Mayflower): Self-Guided Walking Audio Tour

Things to do on the Tour Include:

• Plymouth Visitors Information

  Your tour of Plymouth begins at the Plymouth Visitors Information Center. From here, you'll walk through this picturesque and historic city, learning everything there is to know about the town's long history, from the early tribe to the Plymouth Rock and beyond. As you begin your journey, you'll get acquainted with just who the Pilgrims were, exactly, and how they set about establishing laws for their new society.

• Mayflower II

  The Mayflower II is an absolute Plymouth must-see. A painstakingly-constructed reproduction of the 17th-century Mayflower which carried the Pilgrims to America in 1620, this ship offers a whole new perspective on that journey. As you admire the craft, just try to imagine crossing an entire ocean in a wooden vessel like that!

• Mayflower Society House

  The Mayflower Society House is a beautifully preserved home once owned by the grandson of Edward Winslow, grandson of one of the original Mayflower passengers. Winslow's family helped to build Plymouth, but he threw away all that goodwill by siding with the British crown when revolution started brewing.

• Plymouth Rock

  Hands down the most popular attraction in Plymouth, Plymouth Rock hold tremendous symbolic and historic importance. It is considered to have marked the landing site where the Pilgrims disembarked to found Plymouth in 1620. Historians debate whether the common beliefs about it are accurate, and you'll hear all about that when you visit.

• Chief Massasoit Statue

  This bronze statue of Chief Massasoit honors an important and unusual friendship which helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter. When the Pilgrims first arrived, Massasoit needed an ally in his struggle with the nearby Narragansett tribe. The Pilgrims, likewise, needed help finding and growing food in their new home. The result was an unlikely, and sometimes uneasy, alliance between the two.

• Brewster Gardens

  Brewster Gardens is a park named for William Brewster, one of the original Mayflower passengers. It's also the site of the Town Brook, where the Pilgrims got their drinking water in the early days of the settlement.

• Pilgrim Maiden Statue

  The bronze Pilgrim Maiden statue by sculptor Henry Kitson was erected in 1922. It honors not one specific woman, but all the women who immigrated to this new land and helped to build a new life. Such statues are rare, and this is one of the only women Kitson ever sculpted.

• Burial Hill Cemetery

  Burial Hill Cemetery was established all the way back in the 1600s and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for good reason. More than a few of the Mayflower's original passengers have been buried here. So have other famous historic figures, including iconic patriots from the Revolutionary period.

• Richard Sparrow House Inc

  The Richard Sparrow House is the oldest surviving house in all of Plymouth. It was built around 1640 and has been painstakingly preserved. Even better, you can actually go inside! The house today functions as an art gallery and pottery studio.

• The Plimoth Grist Mill/Conclusion

  The Plimoth Grist Mill is a reconstruction of one of Plymouth's oldest structures, and it's actually still a functioning mill! The grist mill uses water power on the weekends to grind corn, and visitors can even buy fresh-ground corn from the site itself. Your tour concludes here, though there are plenty more optional stops throughout Plymouth for those who want to keep exploring.

• Pilgrim Hall Museum

  The Pilgrim Hall Museum at 75 Court Street in Plymouth, Massachusetts is the oldest public museum in the United States in continuous operation, having opened in 1824.

• National Monument to the Forefathers

  The Mayflower Pilgrims are remembered at the National Monument to the Forefathers, originally known as the Pilgrim Monument. It was dedicated on August 1, 1889, and it commemorates their principles as they came to be accepted by the majority of Americans. Experts agree that it tops the list of the largest granite structures everywhere.

• Hedge House Museum

  "The Plymouth Antiquarian House is a historic house museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts owned by the Plymouth Antiquarian Society. The house was built in 1809 for William Hammatt, a New England sea captain. The Hedges, a family of entrepreneurs, purchased the house in 1830 and lived there until 1919."

• The Jenney Interpretive Centre

  Exhibits in the Interpretive Centre focus on the Pilgrims, stories of their faith and values, the abolitionists and slavery, the family – the cornerstone of society.

• Howland House

  Located at 33 Sandwich Street in Plymouth, Massachusetts is the historic Jabez Howland House. It was in 1667 that Jabez Howland, whose parents John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley Howland sailed on the Mayflower, bought the original portion of this two-story wood-frame house from its builder, Jacob Mitchell.

• Plymouth Long Beach

  Long Beach is a barrier beach– a peninsula that serves as a barrier between the open ocean and the mainland coast.

• Plimoth Patuxet Museums

  Plymouth, Massachusetts is home to the Plimoth Patuxet Museum, a living history museum that has been open since 1947. In the 17th century, a group of English immigrants who would later be known as the Pilgrims established a colony in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts.