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Pulpit Rock: a local historical and literary puzzle

By Brian Fitzgerald

According to local folklore, in the 1640s Puritan minister John Eliot preached to Native Americans on a large boulder formation in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood. Known as the "apostle to the Indians," Eliot translated psalms, catechisms, and even the entire Bible into the Algonquian language, Massachusett.

He also established 14 Chris-tian Indian communities in Mas-sachusetts. Although his sermons at these settlements are well documented, there is no written record of Eliot's preaching to Indians in West Roxbury. None-theless, the "Pulpit Rock" story became legendary when it was told in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Blithedale Romance, which was based on the author's experience at a utopian farming community there.

A visitor at the entrance of Pulpit Rock's cave, described in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Today the giant Pulpit Rock is marked with a rusting sign in a nature sanctuary. But is it a bona fide historical landmark, or merely the setting of a Hawthorne fictional innovation? Historians and Hawthorne scholars have disagreed about the origin -- and the validity -- of the Pulpit Rock tradition for more than 150 years. The question was recently posed to two Boston University English professors emeriti: Hawthorne experts William Vance and Millicent Bell.

Hawthorne's stay at Brook Farm, a transcendental and socialistic community in West Roxbury, lasted just six months during the commune's first year, in 1841. It turned out that he didn't share the idealism of the transcendentalist participants of this experiment, which ended in 1847. In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, one of the classics of American literature, Hawthorne writes that he wouldn't deny that he had Brook Farm in mind when he wrote the novel, but his "whole treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance." He made one thing clear: he wasn't writing a historical chronicle, a commentary on socialism, or an opinion of utopian farming communities. He was writing fiction.

But what of the "Eliot's Pulpit" chapter in the novel? Did Hawthorne fictionalize the religious history of the boulders to add depth to his story? At Pulpit Rock, Hawthorne's protagonist, Miles Coverdale, with his eyes half closed, imagines that he "used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration."

Hawthorne writes that Coverdale customarily went to the rock formation to spend Sunday afternoons with a man named Hol-lingsworth and two women, Zenobia and Priscilla. Hollings-worth talked to the other three from atop the boulders as if he were preaching. "It seemed most pitiful -- a positive calamity to the world -- that a treasury of golden thoughts should be thus scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three, when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them."

Hollingworth was, in effect, delivering sermons, 200 years after John Eliot supposedly gave homilies to Native Americans there. "Hawthorne obviously felt free to innovate to enhance the parallels of a story," says Vance. "But I think he used a core of actual history as a base."

The Pulpit Rock "tradition"

	John Eliot's Massachusett Bible in the Algonquian language, printed in Cambridge in 1663. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University

Pulpit Rock "was known to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit from a tradition that the venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an Indian auditory," writes Hawthorne. "The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the scanty soil within these crevices were sweeter to their roots than any other earth."

That description is fairly accurate 150 years later. A large tree grows in the middle of the group of boulders. There are inconsistencies, however. The rocks are not just granite, an igneous stone; they are classified as Roxbury pudding stone, a conglomerate that contains some Dedham granite. But Hawthorne was hardly a geologist. He was a writer of fiction. "He could have modified the rocks' actual appearance in his writing," says Bell, who is president of the Hawthorne Society. "Any novelist does this kind of thing."

After all, what is fiction but a collection of half-truths creatively arranged? Still, Vance says that it's unlikely Hawthorne conjured up the entire John Eliot story. "Hawthorne was interested in local colonial history," he says. "He wasn't always accurate in every detail, but he knew that some of his readership of The Blithedale Romance would be the people who stayed at Brook Farm. They would have been outraged if he weren't somewhat true to history. I doubt that the story is a total Hawthorne fabrication."

Vance points out that Hawthorne mentions Pulpit Rock in his journal The American Note Books, which the author's wife published in 1868, four years after his death. "The entry was made in 1841," says Vance, "which was nine years before The Blithedale Romance was published." However, Hawthorne's description doesn't mention Eliot.

History vs. fiction

Who gave Pulpit Rock its moniker? And does the John Eliot story predate Hawthorne's stay at Brook Farm? The answer depends on whose Brook Farm memories one believes. Annie Salisbury, who stayed at the utopian community in the summer of 1843, reported in a Boston Evening Transcript article in 1894 that "here the ‘apostle' Eliot preached to the Indians."

However, another Brook Farmer, John Codman, thought that the Eliot story was a product of Hawthorne's imagination. He calls the rock formation "Hawthorne's ‘Eliot's Pulpit' " in an 1899 essay. And in his 1894 book Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs, he writes, "I was thinking of the big boulders that join and make a hole that we called ‘the cave' over which Hawthorne's fancy made the apostle Eliot preach to the Indians, giving it the name of ‘Eliot's Pulpit.' "

Codman does corroborate Hawthorne's description of an enclosed cavity between the boulders. "At the base of the pulpit," Hawthorne writes in the novel, "the broken bowlders inclined towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower." A small cave is still there today, although it takes some poetic imagination to visualize four adults fitting inside.

There are other pudding stone caves in the vicinity, including one that could easily fit several people, in the Hancock Woods nature reservation a half-mile east of Pulpit Rock. Both formations are connected by the same stream. "It's possible that Hawthorne hiked away from Brook Farm, found the other cave, and conflated the descriptions of the two rock formations," says Vance. "It would have been consistent with his manipulation of physical environments in his novels. For example, in his description of the house in The House of Seven Gables, he actually combined the characteristics of several houses."

Indeed, in the conclusion of The Blithedale Romance, the suicide drowning of Zenobia in the Charles River is similar to Hawthorne's account in The American Note Books of an event he witnessed at another site: the recovery of a young woman's body from the Concord River. And Brook Farmers have pointed out that the character of Zenobia is a compilation of several women at the commune.

To be sure, people took exception to Hawthorne's creative revisionism. In an unsigned review of the novel in an 1852 edition of the Christian Examiner, a writer complains, "No one of the excellent women who formed the community at Brook Farm was driven to suicide by disappointed love . . . we maintain that a novelist has no right to tamper with actual verities." But the reviewer doesn't mention anything about Hawthorne confounding fact and fiction with Pulpit Rock. He also lambastes The Scarlet Letter. "How would this outrageous fiction, which is utterly without foundation, deceive a reader who had no exact knowledge of our history!"

Bell notes that The Scarlet Letter "isn't based on an account of one woman who was the real Hester Prynne -- there were undoubtedly several women who were punished for adultery and had to wear some kind of badge." Hawthorne evidently did his research, but changed the facts to fit his story. "That is the mark of the novelist," says Bell.

John Eliot

No record has been found of Eliot's preaching to Native Americans at Pulpit Rock. West Roxbury is not listed among Eliot's 14 villages of "praying Indians," but neither is a stone bluff on a hill overlooking a pond in Freetown, Mass., where he earned a salary for preaching to Native Americans. Eliot's sermons weren't limited to the sites of official "praying towns."

According to historians and archaeologists, unusual boulder formations such as Pulpit Rock would fit the mold as one of Eliot's outdoor pulpits. In the book Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England's Native Civilization, archaeologists James Mavor and Byron Dix write that Daniel Gookin, superintendent of the Indians in the Massachusetts Colony at the time Eliot preached, reported that the praying villages "were not located by Eliot and Gookin, but by the Indian powwows or shamans, at or near their historic places of ritual."

They assert that for Native Americans, spirits lived in the fantastic shapes of nature, including large glacial erratics. For example, the praying village of Nashoba, in what is now Boxborough, Mass., was located at a giant boulder perched atop another boulder. The formation, which was destroyed when the land was cleared for an industrial park, contained "a shelf or overhang large enough to shelter a person." Did Hawthorne have this or a similar formation in mind?

Eliot's first known sermon to the Native Americans was a 75-minute talk on October 18, 1646, in Nonantum, a hill near the Charles River in Newton, Mass. Was Pulpit Rock an opportune site for Eliot to deliver a sermon when he was traveling from Boston to Nonantum, or to Natick, the first and largest praying town? That settlement was also on the Charles.

Eliot's conversion activities with Native Americans were curtailed during and after King Philip's War, which occurred between 1675 and 1677. Relations between colonists and the native tribes deteriorated, and particularly savage hostilities killed thousands of English and even more Indians. Many of the surviving Indians "were executed, sold into slavery, or imprisoned on Deer Island and other islands in Boston Harbor," says Jill Lepore, an assistant professor of history at CAS. If Eliot did preach at Pulpit Rock, he made no mention of it in his writings. And any Native American memories of a Pulpit Rock sermon would have been taken to the grave by a people decimated by war and disease.

Pulpit Rock today

Scholars continue to debate the symbolism of Pulpit Rock. A 1968 essay by Leo Levy in the journal Studies in Romanticism says that The Blithdale Romance "builds on the paradox of a future based on a simpler mode of life, derived from the values of an earlier period," and that Eliot's Pulpit exemplifies this analogy because it "remains the uncultivated tract where the Apostle Eliot preached to the Indians two centuries before."

No archaeological testing has been done at Pulpit Rock. Boston's city archaeologist received oral permission from the Roxbury Historical Society to do so in 1991, but concentrated on the sites of Brook Farm's long-demolished buildings instead. He did, however, find projectile points in the excavation, confirming a Native American presence in the area.

The Pulpit Rock puzzle has many pieces -- some of them missing -- that link different eras in American history. Even if Pulpit Rock's past remains a mystery, attempting to retrace the steps of the people who ascended it could give us clues to the creative process of a great American writer, insight into a noble utopian experiment that failed, as well as additional details about an honorable 17th-century religious mission. That mission harkens back to a more innocent time, when colonists and Native Americans coexisted in New England.

10 November 2000
Boston University
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