Thomas Morton (colonist)
Early American colonist from Devon, England
Thomas Morton (c. 1579 – 1647) is known today for building the first Maypole in America; it was cut down after two years by the Puritans. He also was an early colonist in North America from Devon, England. He was a lawyer, writer, and social reformer known for studying American Indian culture, and he founded the colony of Merrymount, located in Quincy, Massachusetts. He is the author of New English Canaan, an anti-Puritan work which could be considered the first book banned in America, as it was banned by the Puritans in colonial times.
Life and career
Mount Wollaston
Only two years after the founding of Plymouth Colony, Thomas Morton took a three-month exploratory trip to America in 1622, but was back in England by early 1623 complaining of intolerance among ruling elements of the Puritan community. He returned in 1624 as a senior partner in a Crown-sponsored trading venture aboard the ship Unity with his associate Captain Wollaston and 30 indentured young men. They began trading for furs on a spit of land belonging to the Algonquian tribes. They called their location Mount Wollaston.
Wollaston and Morton immediately began selling liquor and firearms to the Indians, disregarding the laws of Plymouth Colony.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q176584. VIAF identifies the subject as 20593243. The Library of Congress control number is n50007937. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1579, 1647, 1622 and 1623.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Morton (colonist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.