Last Updated on 3/12/2010

Published on 9/4/2008
Written by Heather Pelham

It’s a quiet morning in Wedgefield. A lawn mower cuts a smooth swath through the winding golf course, birds sing, and cars depart their driveways with a genteel crunch of gravel.

The somnolence is short-lived. In one verdant back yard graced with a half-built addition, members of a camera crew set up their state of the art equipment and absentmindedly slap at mosquitoes.

“Action!” yells the director, and local builder Alan Wheeler begins to tell his story.
The camera crew belongs to a British production company called Pilgrim Productions, which  was hired by the Travel Channel to do a special Thanksgiving documentary on the descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims.

“We’re trying to get rid of the image of stodgy old men wearing all black clothing,” explained Production Assistant Jamie Broome. “The Pilgrims were revolutionaries, the hippies of their time. They were adventurers who left behind everything they knew. We want to show who they really were.”

We know the Pilgrims were Puritans, worshippers who broke with the Church of England, tired of its overly ornate trappings and non-scriptural teachings. The Pilgrims objected to religious symbols, mass, the idea of purchasing forgiveness, the Pope, the Saints, and the church hierarchy.

They even considered marriage a civil ceremony that had nothing to do with God. While most Puritans reluctantly agreed to worship under the umbrella of the Church of England, a more rebellious group from the midlands, the Separatists, refused.  By 1604, King James had had enough of the Separatists, and began to root out and jail those who would not conform.

The Separatists headed to the Netherlands, which was less than welcoming. They decided to sail to the New World, an arduous journey to a wilderness reportedly full of hostile natives and savage animals. Rebels, indeed.

But the Mayflower landed in modern-day Cape Cod in November of 1620, and the Pilgrims were so busy trying to carve a colony out of the wilderness and survive the frigid winter, there wasn’t a great deal of time to keep a diary. How do you get into a pilgrim’s head, 388 years later?

“We talk to their descendants,” Broome said with conviction. “Many of the modern folks we’re meeting are rebels in their own way. It’s come through the blood.”

The television show, which will run for one hour, features six descendants of the Mayflower travelers, each of whom has been drawn to a career much like that of their Pilgrim ancestor.

“We’re traveling around the States to meet these people, showing what they do now, explaining how it relates to what their ancestors did,” Broome said.

The documentary segments will follow the needs of the Pilgrims – to reach the New World, set up shelter, protect themselves, feed themselves, and practice their controversial religion. The first part features a modern-day sailor, a descendant of Mayflower Captain Christopher Jones.

Then Georgetown homebuilder Alan Wheeler will talk about how his modern-day homes – lovely places with manifold Colonial details – compare to those built by his ancestor, Mayflower carpenter Francis Eaton.

A soldier who works in Intelligence and serves in Iraq will compare his job with that of his ancestor, a Mayflower military man who spent most of his time wooing the natives into trade and carrying a big stick.

Then, it’s off to Connecticut to interview a modern-day farmer and to Massachusetts to meet a Plymouth brewer. The brewer is descended from Mayflower barrel-maker John Alden, whose creations were the only thing protecting vital drink and food stores from spoilage. Because potable water was in short supply on a long voyage, many of those drink barrels were full of beer.

The documentary then meets the pastor of the original Congregational Church of America.

“He’s a fascinating, outspoken guy, and knows a great deal about why the Mayflower passengers left England in the first place,” Broome said. “His church governs itself very much along the lines of the Mayflower Compact.”

Finally, the show will sample the delicacies made by a Mayflower-descended chef, who will add a modern twist to food items available to the Pilgrims.

Each interview will be liberally salted with historical tidbits, surviving documents, and footage from the recreated Plymouth Colony and the historically-accurate Charles Towne Colony north of Charleston.

“Our documentary will be part history show, part travel show and part pure adventure,” promised Broome.

Alan Wheeler

“I didn’t even know who my ancestors were until rather recently,” Alan Wheeler says, sitting in his living room in Harmony Township. He built the home himself, and it is full of the Colonial details that make his work so popular.

“When my parents found themselves with an empty nest, my father started researching our family tree,” Wheeler said. “He was able to trace us back to Plymouth then, when he got into the British records, he followed our line to William the Conqueror and then to Charlemagne.”

Despite not knowing his connection with his illustrious ancestors, Wheeler realizes he exhibited some of their better-known traits.

“William the Conqueror was a big guy with a temper, and I’m no shrinking violet myself,” the lanky homebuilder said. “I even attended a military university.”

But there would be even more echoes from Francis Eaton, the carpenter who spent the winter of 1620-21 frantically building homes for the Pilgrims, who were camping out in the dank, insalubrious Mayflower.

“I started building 22 years ago,” Wheeler said. “I was always attracted to Colonial architecture – I would travel to Nantucket and take 300 photos of front doors from that era. I don’t do restorations, but I like to build new homes in the colonial style.”

Despite Wheeler’s fascination with architecture and building – the college history major once received an A++ for a paper in which he resurrected Roman architecture in a hacienda-style home – he resisted the call.

“I got a pilot’s license, and was going to fly for a career, then I tried corporate banking,” Wheeler said. “Then my William the Conqueror side came out and I realized I didn’t want to have a boss.”

A short stint in sales was followed by a start-up computer company, but none of the jobs satisfied Wheeler. Meanwhile, he was happily helping friends build porches and additions on their homes and making lamps and jewelry boxes out of historic salvage items. He helped one friend build her home from scratch. When the experienced building superintendent left, Wheeler stepped in.

“I put on my jeans and we did the home’s foundation,” he recalled. “I loved it – the earth, the concrete, it was an instant high.”

He found that the work was intuitive. When a problem presented itself, he found a creative way to solve it. When the home was finished, Wheeler’s new passion for building was just beginning.

After 14 years in Greensboro, Wheeler came to the Lowcountry on a weekend trip. The sailor and scuba diving enthusiast was struck by a simple sign with a sailboat and no other markings – the Harmony sign. Within a week, he had decided to move to Georgetown, where he and a growing number of Colonial-inspired homes have lived ever since.

Like his Mayflower ancestor, Wheeler followed his adventurous heart, was drawn irresistibly into homebuilding, and ultimately crafted his home on the coast. Apparently, it truly is in the genes.

The Travel Channel show “American Pilgrim” will premiere on Nov. 23 at 10 p.m.