THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 27 



Meeting in Plummer Hall, Monday^ March 22^ 1897. 

 — At a meeting of the Essex Institute, holden at Salem, 

 March 22, 1897, the following vote was adopted : 



Votedy That, in the judgment of the Essex Institute, 

 the tract of land overlooking Gloucester Harbor and 

 at various times known as " Stage Fort," " Stage Head," 

 and "Fisherman's Field," is a fitting location to be ac- 

 quired by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as and for 

 a State Park. 



Its history entitles it to recognition. As early as the 

 winter of 1623-4, a group of pioneers began a fishing 

 plantation there. A part of them, in 1626, moved up the 

 shore to Naumkeag, and effected the settlement which, 

 reinforced by Endecott and his party in 1628, and by 

 Higginson and his party in 1629, became Salem in July 

 of the last named year, and was the foundation of the 

 Colony of Massachusetts Bay. 



In honor of the Chief of these pioneers, the War De- 

 partment, at the suggestion of the Institute in February, 

 1864, gave to the works then projected at this point to 

 supplant the ancient Revolutionary defences of Gloucester 

 Harbor, the name of "Fort Conant." The Sheffield patent 

 of 1623, under which these settlers claimed, provided for 

 a compact town on the water-side of Cape Ann Bay, — 

 each planter to have thirty acres in severalty, — and five 

 hundred acres of common land along the Bay to be de- 

 voted to the public uses of schools, churches, hospitals, 

 and the maintenance of ministers, magistrates, and other 

 town functionaries, — a typical New England village, 

 worthy for its own sake of a lasting memorial. 



No spot is more closely than this identified with the 

 origin of Massachusetts. Its picturesque and uneven 

 surface would well meet the demands of landscape garden- 

 ing, — its unrivalled ocean outlook makes it the ideal of 



