The place where I live has been called the Burgess Place. This family had lived in the house from 1801 to 1959, beginning 32 years after it was built. This span amounts to more than a century and a half. The first two Burgess generations here, headed by John, born 1765 and Phineas, born 1807, earned their sustenance from this soil. Peleg, born 1840, lived here and later in Plymouth center. He bought the place from his father and his children in turn bought it from him in 1918 and spent their summers here until 1959. As a sub-title to my account I have used the phrase “an account of a local habitation and some names.” You Shakespereans will recognize a borrowing from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, V. 1, in which the poet explains how it is possible for the imagination to give body to forms of things, turn them into shapes and “give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Perhaps a modern concept would be to say a place and an identity. In a sense we do have records, annals, traditions to guide us that are more than airy nothings, but hopefully, imagination may help produce a broader understanding of the experience we see before us with the aid of the mind’s eye. CHAPTER I. THE FACE OF THE LAND AND GROWING THINGS I would like to go back with you farther, to fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. At that time the finale of the ice sheets was at hand. The ice sheets, hundreds of feet thick, started as glaciers in Canada perhaps a million years ago and worked southward two thousand miles and came to a melting end and their progress stopped in the Cape Cod and Nantucket area. They scraped bedrock to leave white sands, dumping earth debris to form moraines and drumlins. They left deep kettle holes of solid ice, which melted and formed what are now the many ponds of the area. The whole Plymouth region is dotted by many such ponds of various sizes. It seems that nature wants to cover over water areas, so eventually some of these low depressions became swamps, bogs and low woodlands. Swamp shrubs such as alder, sweet pepperbush, sheep laurel, blueberries, acid loving plants, are everywhere, as are sedge, sphagnum moss, aquatic plants. Pitcher plants in low areas trap insects, as do sundews, as a source of some protein. Pink sabbatia grows abundantly on the shores of South and Boot Ponds, a jewel among wild flowers. It has been called the Rose of Plymouth. Its botanical name is sabatia angularis, and its stem gives the illusion of having four sides.