The Pilgrims first made landfall at the tip of Cape Cod, but were reluctant to settle there due to the lack of fresh water.

[1] John Jenney arrived in the Plymouth Colony from Leyden in 1623, and built a grist mill on Town Brook in 1636.

Each Spring, the brook sees thousands of alewives, an anadromous type of herring, swimming up its path to eventually spawn in the Billington Sea.

In the time since the Pilgrims' arrival, the number of alewives have dwindled drastically due to the increasing human population and industrialization of the area (including numerous dams).

Starting in 2008, counts began receiving considerable recognition and recording by Plymouth's Department of Marine and Environmental Affairs and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Additionally, projects around the region to remove old dams have helped the alewife numbers increase, and have received support from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S.