Plimoth Plantation officials knew the crowds would be large when a private foundation guaranteed free admission to the living history museum last week. They never imagined the magnitude of the draw.
Final admission figures show just less than 8,000 people visited the Plantation last Friday. That’s nearly 3,000 more than the museum hosted on its busiest day ever, a Thanksgiving in the late 1990s.
And 4,000 people visited Mayflower II, the Plantation’s waterfront exhibit, last Friday as well.
The Highland Street Foundation, a Framingham-based charity, underwrote free admission to the museum as part of a summer-long Free Fun Fridays anniversary celebration.
Plantation officials did not know what to expect when first approached about the offer, but they gradually learned from other participating museums and institutions that attendance would likely triple or quadruple.
Paula Peters, the Plantation’s director of marketing and public relations, said the other museums warned local officials that visitors taking advantage of the deal were abuzz with plans to visit Plimoth Plantation.
“We geared up as if it was going to be like a Thanksgiving Day, all hands on,” Peters said. “Everyone was in a guest-facing-position, so that was exciting for us, but we had no idea of the magnitude of people that were going to come here. … Managing that from a parking lot perspective was difficult.”
Peters said none of the visitors complained. Two children were briefly separated from their families but got to ride around in golf carts until they were reunited.
Plantation staff briefly opened the men’s room in the visitor’s center to women to relieve congestion and opened the staff parking lot to visitors, but there were no other crowd control issues.
“We had originally feared that with so many people coming here at once they wouldn’t get the true immersion into the Plimoth Plantation experience, and I think just the opposite happened,” Peters said. “It was as if because there were so many other people there listening to the story, it sort of added credibility to the story and added credibility to their whole experience.”
The record-setting attendance was also a great morale booster for staff members.
“They were just so thrilled that so many people, given the opportunity, would come here and see them,” Peters said. “It was amazing. We also know that so many of those people just couldn’t come here otherwise, so we’re so grateful to Highland Street Foundation.”
