[3] The front of the statue's plinth reads: JOHN BRIDGE  •   1578–1665  •   left braintree, essex county, england.

•   he had supervision of the first public school  •   established in cambridge 1635  •   was selectman 1635–1652  •   deacon of the church 1636–1658  •   representative to the great and general court 1637–1641  •   and was appointed by that body to lay out lands  •   in this town and beyond.

The other three faces read: THIS PURITAN  •   helped to establish here  •   church school  •   and representative government  •   and thus to plant  •   a Christian commonwealth.

[5] When some colonists led by Thomas Hooker left Cambridge for Connecticut, Bridge remained.

[15] Higginson described the statue as being noteworthy in representing "the common man," and even suggested that it was "the first time...that the every-day Puritan has appeared in sculpture.

[19] The statue accompanied many other Gilded Age erections of this genre, in which Puritans or Pilgrims stood for American ideals and reasserted a fantasy of the "moral values, social dominance, and political leadership of the nation's New England, and specifically Anglo Saxon, colonists.

In 1922, the figure was found with a rope around the neck, and newspapers speculated that "college boys or other young men of Cambridge" had committed the act.