BORN: Circa 1603/likely at Dorking or Guildford, Surrey, England
DIED: Between 1651 and 1687/Duxbury, Plymouth Colony

Priscilla arrived on the Mayflower in the company of her father William, a prosperous shoemaker; his wife Alice, who may have been Priscilla’s stepmother; her younger brother Joseph; and a male servant named Robert Carter. Left behind in England were her older, married siblings. Of those who came over, all but Priscilla perished the first winter. She may afterwards have gone to live in the Carver household, as her father had asked John Carver to “have an eye over my wife and children to be as [a] father … and freind … to them.”

Priscilla and her family were not part of the Leiden company, nor was former ship’s cooper John Alden, whom Priscilla married by 1623. After the 1628 land division, she and John settled on property in the new town of Duxbury, where they raised ten children.

John returned to Plymouth often on colony business and also acted as a land agent. While John was away, Priscilla oversaw family and farm affairs.

We know little about Priscilla’s life. Although she may have received more education than her teenage peers, given her age and family’s well-to-background, no writings by her have survived. Her family home in Dorking, Surrey, England still stands, and recent attention paid to artifacts found at her Duxbury homesite shed light on aspects of her daily life.

Priscilla Mullins achieved immortal fame as the romantic lead in her nineteenth-century 

descendant Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Myles Standish.” According to Longfellow, Priscilla chose to marry John Alden when he came to court her on Standish’s behalf. Although this tale is impossible to verify, we can be sure Priscilla had her choice of suitors, given that she was one of the few young women of marriageable age in Plymouth’s early years. She also possessed an inheritance, company shares, and acreage from the division of land.