“Did you finish your chores?”
It’s a question children have probably heard in one form or another for centuries. But imagine the answer mattered to more than whether your bedroom was clean. Imagine living in a community where food had to be planted, gathered, caught or hunted; water and firewood had to be carried; clothes had to be washed and repaired by hand; meals were prepared over a fire; and nearly everything your household needed had to be made, raised or traded for.
Now imagine being twelve years old. Welcome to childhood in Plymouth Colony. The children who arrived aboard the Mayflower were not merely passengers accompanying the adults who made history. They worked, learned, suffered, adapted—and survived at an extraordinary rate. In fact, by the spring of 1621, roughly half of Plymouth’s surviving population was under eighteen years old. Their story gives us a very different picture of childhood.
First Surprise: There Were a Lot of Children on the Mayflower
The Mayflower wasn’t carrying an expedition made up primarily of adult men. According to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, approximately 30 of the 102 passengers were under eighteen. They ranged from infants to teenagers. There was one child born during the Atlantic crossing: Oceanus Hopkins. Another, Peregrine White, was born while the Mayflower was anchored at Cape Cod. There were toddlers such as one-year-old Humility Cooper and Samuel Eaton. There were young children including Mary, Remember and Bartholomew Allerton. And there were teenagers such as Francis Billington, Constance Hopkins, Mary Chilton, John Cooke and Priscilla Mullins.
Some traveled with their parents. Others did not. And some were already working.
Some Mayflower Children Already Had Jobs
Childhood in the seventeenth century did not look like childhood today. The Mayflower Society notes that many of the children from the Pilgrims’ Leiden community were already accustomed to hard labor because they had worked to help support their families. Several young passengers traveled aboard the Mayflower as servants or apprentices. William Latham, for example, was about eleven and traveled as part of Governor John Carver’s household. John Hooke, about fourteen, was an apprentice associated with Isaac Allerton’s family. Fifteen-year-old William Butten was a servant to Dr. Samuel Fuller and tragically died during the Atlantic crossing.
To modern eyes, eleven seems extraordinarily young to be a servant. To a seventeenth-century family, the boundary between childhood and the productive adult world was very different. Children learned by participating. Work was part of growing up.
And Then Came the First Winter
Nothing could have prepared Plymouth’s children for what happened next. During the winter of 1620–1621, approximately half of the Mayflower passengers died. Remarkably, children survived at a substantially higher rate than adults. The Mayflower Society records that only five of the approximately 30 children died, leaving 25 children alive by the end of the first winter. That meant roughly half of the surviving Plymouth community was under eighteen.
Why did children survive at such a high rate? We don’t know. The Mayflower Society discusses several possible explanations but appropriately cautions that there is no proof for them. The historical fact we can establish is the extraordinary survival rate itself. And that survival created another problem. Many children had lost the adults responsible for them.
Nine Children Needed New Families
The Mayflower Society identifies nine surviving children who were orphaned or otherwise without their parents and were incorporated into Plymouth households. Twelve-year-old Samuel Fuller lost both parents during the first winter. His uncle, Dr. Samuel Fuller, took him in. Joseph Rogers became part of William Bradford’s household. Richard More remained with William and Mary Brewster. Mary Chilton, whose parents both died, became associated with the widowed Myles Standish’s household. Elizabeth Tilley lost her parents, aunt and uncle. Pilgrim Hall reports that she is believed to have joined John and Katherine Carver’s household. She was about thirteen when the Mayflower arrived.
These weren’t households enjoying abundance. The adults taking in children had just endured the same winter. They had buried spouses, friends and relatives. Food and shelter remained uncertain. Yet Plymouth reorganized itself around the people who remained. The children became part of new households. That may be one of the quieter stories of Plymouth—and one of its most remarkable.
So What Were the Chores?
Here we need to resist the temptation to invent a neat “Pilgrim Child’s Chore Chart.” No surviving document tells us that every ten-year-old carried water at 7:00am and fed animals at 7:30am. What the historical record does show is a society in which household survival required labor, and children participated in that working world according to their age and ability. We even have Bradford describing small children going directly into the fields.
When Plymouth reorganized its agricultural arrangements in 1623, Bradford wrote that women willingly went to plant corn and “took their little ones with them.” Older children could perform increasingly substantial work. Girls were expected to acquire domestic and textile skills. Pilgrim Hall notes that English girls learned sewing from childhood; surviving objects from later Plymouth households provide evidence of the needlework skills expected of young women.
Boys and girls would have grown up observing—and increasingly participating in—the work necessary to operate a household. That could mean helping with food preparation, crops, animals, clothing, cleaning, carrying, gathering and other household work, although specific duties varied by household, age, sex, circumstances and period. The key distinction is important: Children didn’t simply have chores added to childhood. Work was part of childhood.
What About School?
Here’s another surprise. The Mayflower didn’t arrive with a schoolhouse.
Pilgrim Hall notes that Plymouth’s first dedicated school building wasn’t constructed until 1705, long after the original Mayflower generation. That does not mean children were uneducated. For the Pilgrims, literacy had profound religious importance. Pilgrim Hall’s research into books for colonial children explains that young children in seventeenth-century Plymouth read the Bible and that most families owned at least one. Religious instruction was considered a central responsibility of parents because children needed to be able to understand Scripture.
Catechisms were another educational tool. And don’t imagine brightly illustrated workbooks designed for beginning readers. Pilgrim Hall describes one seventeenth-century catechism intended in part for children that contained small type, difficult vocabulary and lengthy answers. Older children might encounter books written for adults—including history, geography and accounts of travel. William Brewster’s substantial library included works describing New England, European events and voyages of exploration. Learning and daily life were therefore much less separated than they are today.
For a Plymouth child, education could occur inside the household and church and alongside the work of ordinary life. For homeschool families, that may sound strangely familiar.
Children Saw the Adult World Up Close
One of the biggest differences between childhood then and now may have been how difficult it was to insulate children from adult realities.
They witnessed illness. They experienced death. They saw food shortages. They watched houses being built. They participated in planting. Some had crossed an ocean after already experiencing religious exile with their families. Others had been separated from their biological parents before the voyage even began.
The four More children provide an especially painful example. Ellen, Jasper, Richard and Mary More, ranging from roughly four to eight years old, were sent aboard the Mayflower without their parents and placed in other families. Only Richard survived the first winter. These are difficult stories. But they remind us that children were not standing somewhere outside the history happening around them. They were living it.
Plymouth Needed Its Children
This may be the most important part of the story. When we talk about Plymouth’s survival, we naturally concentrate on adults: Bradford, Brewster, Winslow, Standish, Carver. But consider the numbers again. Twenty-five children survived the first winter. Roughly half the remaining colony was under eighteen.
Those children represented Plymouth’s future workforce, families, church members and community leaders.
- John Cooke was thirteen.
- Mary Chilton was thirteen.
- Elizabeth Tilley was thirteen.
- Constance Hopkins was fourteen.
- Francis Billington was fourteen.
- Love Brewster was about thirteen according to the Mayflower Society’s reconstruction.
They weren’t simply children who happened to witness the founding of Plymouth. They became part of the generation that built what came next.
Maybe the Chores Weren’t the Point
It’s tempting to finish by telling modern children how fortunate they are. No carrying water! No planting corn! No washing everything by hand! But that misses the more interesting lesson.
The children of Plymouth were expected to become contributing members of a household and community. Their responsibilities grew with their abilities. They learned through books, Scripture, observation and work. They experienced consequences when things went wrong and saw firsthand what happened when people cooperated to make things go right. And after a winter that took roughly half the passengers, Plymouth’s surviving children had another lesson placed before them: A family could be changed overnight.
Nine children needed somewhere to belong. Other households made room. So perhaps the question Plymouth gives modern families isn’t: “Are your children’s chores hard enough?” It is something better:, “Are we preparing our children to become capable people who understand that they have something valuable to contribute?”
The children of Plymouth weren’t merely being prepared for the future. They were already helping build it. And sometimes they did it while following their mothers into a cornfield.
The essential source for this article is General Society of Mayflower Descendants — Children of the Mayflower. It documents the approximately 30 children aboard, the remarkable survival of 25, children’s experience with labor in Leiden, young servants aboard the ship, and the nine children incorporated into other households after the first winter.
For the wonderful image of mothers taking their little children into the fields to plant corn, visit Pilgrim Hall Museum — William Bradford in 17th Century Documents. For education and literacy, Pilgrim Hall Museum — Books for Colonial Children documents Bible reading, catechisms and the religious importance placed upon children’s literacy. For the broader family story, Mayflower Society — Women of the Mayflower documents both women’s household and agricultural work and their assumption of responsibility for orphaned children.
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