Attorney David Leslie-Hughes with model of the Mayflower

Today in the Bucks County Courthouse in Pennsylvania, a 20-inch-long and 22-inch-tall model of the Mayflower, the ship that carried English separatists, known as Pilgrims, to Massachusetts in 1620,  will go on public display for the first time in the United States.  The model is said to be built from a plank from the original ship.   The display is part of a local historian’s presentation on the lives of William Penn and his father.  What does the Mayflower have to do with William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania?  Not a lot, but there is a tangential connection. William Penn died in Ruscombe, and was buried in the cemetery of the Jordans Quaker meeting house, which happens to be a few hundred yards from the “Mayflower Barn.”  The barn is said to have been built from the planking and timbers of the Mayflower of 1620.  In the 1930s, members of the national Quaker society removed a piece of timber from the barn and commissioned a model maker to craft three replicas of the Mayflower, one of which is being displayed today in Buck’s  County.

Model Mayflower fashioned from actual ship’s timber