Ancestors

James Cole

b. 1600 · Highgate near London → Saco in Maine → Plymouth MA
Born 1600
Children include James

He was living at Highgate outside London in 1616, married about 1624, and had two sons born in England before he crossed. He came first to Saco in Maine in 1632 and moved down to Plymouth the following year, where he was admitted a freeman at once and appears on the tax list in 1634. In 1637 his name is on the list of volunteers raised against the Pequots.

What he is remembered for is the ground he took. He was the first settler on the rise above the shore that has been called Cole's Hill ever since, and that hill was the Pilgrims' first burying place, where they had put something close to half the Mayflower company into unmarked graves through the winter of 1620 and levelled the earth over them so the Wampanoag would not count the dead. His holding ran down the south side of Leyden Street to the water, and it probably took in the boulder that later generations decided was Plymouth Rock.

About 1638 he opened a public house on that land, the first inn in Plymouth and among the first in New England, and he or his son kept it for sixty years. The town used him: surveyor of highways in 1641, 1642, 1651 and 1652, constable in 1641 and 1644. Grants came steadily, fifty acres at Lakenham meadow in 1641, more the next year, land at Sacconet Neck in 1662 and thirty acres on the Namuet River in 1665. In 1668 he sold the house and the ground below it to his son James. Savage has him still living in 1688, very aged. The dates of his death and his wife's are not known.

Sources

Ernest Byron Cole, The Descendants of James Cole of Plymouth, 1633 (New York: The Grafton Press, 1908), first generation, no. 1
James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England (Boston, 1860), vol. I, under COLE

If James Cole is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "James Cole (b. 1600)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-cole-1600-fe3a2d.