Pilgrim hat
The tall black hat with a buckle on its band is the popular picture of a Pilgrim, and its best-known detail is wrong. The men of early Plymouth wore wide-brimmed felt hats or knitted caps, but buckles did not become fashionable until later in the 1600s; the buckled, black-clad Pilgrim is a nineteenth-century picture.
Meaning
Plimoth Patuxet Museums says men and boys in the 1620s wore knitted wool caps or felt hats with wide brims against sun and rain; women wore linen coifs over their pinned-up hair, and felt hats over those. Everyday clothes were coloured: brown, brick red, yellow and blue were common. Black was hard to dye and expensive, so it was kept for best, and because people sat for portraits in their best clothes, the portraits show black. The General Society of Mayflower Descendants adds that probate records of the Pilgrims list violet, blue and green clothing. The museum’s own note on its reproduction hat says there is no buckle because “buckles became very fashionable much later in the 1600s” and the people who sailed to New England in the 1620s and 1630s “did not wear big buckles on their hats and shoes”.
Origin and history
The Pilgrim in black with buckled hat and shoes is an image of the nineteenth century. Pilgrim Hall Museum says that by the middle of that century the Plymouth settlers and their landing at Plymouth Rock had become part of America’s national mythology, and that much of what is “known” about the Pilgrims is “myth and memory”. The General Society of Mayflower Descendants names the black clothing, buckles and blunderbusses of 19th- and early 20th-century pictures as what the Pilgrims did not wear. James W. Baker, a former historian at Plimoth Plantation, gives a reason, as quoted by the Christian Science Monitor: illustrators gave the Pilgrims buckles as a mark of quaintness, the same reason they gave Santa Claus buckles, and the blunderbuss for its old-fashioned look.
What the Wampanoag remember on Cole’s Hill
The National Day of Mourning began at an anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing. In September 1970 Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag, was invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing; asked to submit his speech in advance, he was told it was too inflammatory (Pilgrim Hall Museum). He gave it instead on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, above Plymouth Rock, on Thanksgiving Day. “We the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts,” he said.
Native people have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill every Thanksgiving since. The United American Indians of New England, which James helped found in 1970, organises the Day of Mourning. The plaque the town of Plymouth put up on Cole’s Hill in 1998, on behalf of the United American Indians of New England, says that many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims, and that to them Thanksgiving Day is “a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures”.
See also
Turkey, Cornucopia, Pumpkin and pumpkin pie, Flint corn (multicoloured corn), Three Sisters, Cranberry.
Sources
- What to Wear?, Homework Help: Wampanoag and colonial English clothing, Plimoth Patuxet Museums
- Children’s Pilgrim Hat, Museum shop description (the museum’s own note on buckles), Plimoth Patuxet Museum Shop
- Dress Like A Pilgrim, General Society of Mayflower Descendants
- A cornucopia of myths: Pilgrims dressed in all black and wore buckles, 23 November 2011; cites James W. Baker, former Plimoth Plantation historian, The Christian Science Monitor
- Plymouth Rock & Pilgrim Myths, Learn, Pilgrim Hall Museum
- National Day of Mourning, Thanksgiving & National Day of Mourning; includes the suppressed 1970 speech of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, Pilgrim Hall Museum
- National Day of Mourning Monument (1998), You Are the Historian, Unit 5: Giving Thanks, Plimoth Patuxet Museums
- Historical Information, Obituary of Wamsutta Frank James (2001) and Day of Mourning statements, United American Indians of New England
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research