A Free Spirit

In the late 1620s, Thomas Morton founded his own colony on a site he dubbed "Merrymount" at Wollaston in present-day Quincy. He sometimes called his colony "Mary-mount" or "Mare-mount," playing on connotations of sodomy, buggery, and, possibly, Catholicism, in order to shock the Puritans. To the displeasure of the authorities, Morton revived the "pagan " practice of Maypole dancing in 1637, and set himself up as the "Lord of Misrule," a comic Renaissance master of ceremonies. According to William Bradford, Morton also established a "School of Atheism," which was a word employed by other writers of the period to imply sodomy.

Bradford wrote in 1642:
"Marvelous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickedness did grow and break forth here... But that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery (Things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land oftener than once."

Bradford on Morton's Merrymount:
"They also set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices."