Jamestown Settlement with Daffystardust

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This ‘Black Friday’ my family and I decided that instead of joining in the mad dash for great deals on holiday gifts, we’d take the day to enjoy one another’s company and take advantage of our proximity to some of the most important historical sites in the entire United States of America here in Eastern Virginia. If you’ve been reading with us here at LeBlog for a while you might remember last Christmas’ visit to Colonial Williamsburg or my several visits to the Busch Gardens theme park in Williamsburg. This time around, I’ll be sharing pictures and thoughts with you on the Jamestown settlement which is within easy driving distance of these other attractions.

JT21The Jamestown settlement is the location where the very first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere was started back in 1607. This is the toe hold which allowed for English-speaking peoples to expand into lands which were previously unknown to Europeans. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing may be up for debate, but whether or not it is a significant historical event is not. Despite living just a little over an hour away from this historic location through most of my school age years and just a few hours away for most of my adult life, I had not visited the Jamestown settlement since being taken there as a part of a fourth grade field trip back in 1980. The gap between my visits became pretty obvious to me shortly after my family arrived. For starters, the actual museum building I was familiar with from when I was 10 years old, which was built in 1957 when the historic center was first opened, had been replaced in 2006 in honor of the 400th anniversary of the establishment of Jamestown.
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Out front, the flags of the 50 states, which had once been lined up along the edge of the building, were now in two rows jutting out toward the entrance to the complex and paired with a fountain made to look like the sails of a seventeenth century sailing vessel. My nephew and I spent a little time identifying some of the more attractive or bizarre state flags.
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As I mentioned in my article about Colonial Williamsburg back in December, Jamestown is a tourist destination that is often included when history enthusiasts are already visiting Colonial Williamsburg or the Yorktown Victory Center, where George Washington’s Continental Army defeated Cornwalis, forcing a surrender that effectively ended the American Revolution and won us our independence from England. For a little lighter content, there’s also Busch Gardens theme park and Water Country U.S.A. right there too.
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There are a number of combo touring packages that incorporate these attractions, and I noticed several fellow visitors who were displaying badges from Colonial Williamsburg which also granted them entrance to Jamestown. Without such a combo deal, I will admit that the entrance fee for an adult is a little on the high side at more than seventeen dollars. There are yearly passes which significantly reduce costs if you plan on visiting more than once in a year, but I can’t imagine there are many folks who fall into that category. However you wind up experiencing the Jamestown settlement, I would recommend it as an irreplaceable stop for those tourists who seek to walk the land and understand where we came from as a people, even if the answers are not always to our liking.
This is another difference in comparison to my grade school visit. The current displays inside the site’s accompanying museum do an admirable job in covering not just the point of view of the English men and women who made the transatlantic journey seeking independence, a new start, or riches, but also those of the Powhatan tribes they encountered and the Angolan slaves who were quickly part of the equation as well. It is instructive to consider that the settlement began as a private venture supported by charters from the English government, but was a pretty consistent failure until the combination of slave labor and martial law came into play. This really isn’t the story of the success of brave and adventurous visionaries, but it’s an interesting story nonetheless.
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Once you’ve gained entrance, you are sent through some doors and to the left and you can either go straight outdoors to see the exhibits there or you can investigate the more traditional indoor museum displays which are located just beyond the above rotunda room. This is where I first noticed the prominently displayed signs insisting that visitors not take any pictures in the galleries. This was a significant disappointment, and I’m pretty sure that you’d be seeing a greater variety of images from those exhibits here if those rules were not in place. As it is, all of the gallery photos you see here are ones I found on the internet which were taken by somebody else. We began our tour of the museum by viewing a twenty minute film on the basic history of the creation of the Virginia Company and the challenges the residents of Jamestown and the surrounding native Americans faced. I must admit to having been spoiled by modern day movie theaters in which you don’t have to give much thought to the sight lines of the people behind you. I spent most of the twenty minute film hunched over and bent sideways to keep my head out of the way. The film was not as rousing or engaging as the more story-based film at Colonial Williamsburg, but boasted attractive cinematography and succeeded in humanizing its historic figures while communicating the important events and concepts.
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As you can see in the above photo, each of the museum galleries is identified by a key date related to the history of the site, with 1607 being the date of the arrival of the English settlers. There were individual exhibits still in place which I remembered seeing thirty-five years prior, but each was heavily restored or updated, and the overall quality of the museum was very good, with a number of impressively immersive environments created to communicate the worlds of the people involved.
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One of my favorite portions of the indoor galleries was a recreated street from a typical English town of the early seventeenth century, presented in a traditional Tudor style and stretching more than two stories high, with walk-through rooms and at least one still figure peering out from a second story window. Other built environments included the hull of an English sailing vessel, and a wide variety of the sort of simple structures which Jamestown residents would have lived or worked in.
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The presentation of American history has definitely changed since I was in the fourth grade, a fact that may annoy some visitors who prefer a romanticized version of the events which led to the forming of our nation, but I personally appreciate the ethical accuracy with which the current exhibits are presented. One such topic which had passed into American legend was the story of the Powhatan chieftan’s daughter Pocahontas. As much as I love the classic Peggy Lee song “Fever,” it is as guilty as any source of presenting Americans with a thoroughly inaccurate version of the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_k_0dKknA
There doesn’t exist any evidence that Pocahontas and John Smith had any sort of affair at all. According to his own writings, when Smith first met Pocahontas she was “a child of about ten.” His written descriptions of her tended to identify her as a child. The legend about her saving his life when he was a captive of the Powhatan may have some basis in fact, with Smith himself writing about the event, but many modern historians believe that this was either a ritual act used by Powhatan to establish authority over a prisoner or something which had happened to Smith while he was in Turkey in 1602 and told to enhance the story of Pocahontas. The legend, which may have been intended as a moral for peace between different peoples certainly didn’t seem to influence the settlers and Powhatan, who went through multiple stages of cooperation and warring until the native Americans were eventually almost entirely pushed out of the area.
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Pocahontas did, in fact, marry an Englishman at roughly the age of nineteen, but his name was John Rolfe. She was given the Christian name ‘Rebecca,’ which means “Mother of two people” and they had a child the next year. She did act as an emissary of peace between the two peoples and was sent to England to promote the struggling settlement. She had believed Smith dead and was surprised to find him living in England on her arrival. Unfortunately, she died prematurely while she was in England and never did see Rolfe again. Her death destabalized relations between the Powhatan and the settlers, allowing her brother to instigate a surprise attack on the Englishmen in Virginia. Obviously, her story is plenty interesting without embellishment, but sometimes that’s the nature of history.
Disney animation didn’t do much better with their 1995 film.
Once we had spent a good amount of time on the updated galleries, it was time for us to tour the trio of outdoor exhibits. These included a recreation of a Powhatan area, recreations of the three English ships to originally land in the Chesapeake, and a recreation of the Jamestown fort. This last is not on the exact location of the original for two significant reasons. First, continued archaeological investigation is being done on the original site. Second, due to erosion the original fort’s location is currently partially underwater. In 2012 archaeologists discovered remains of a teenaged girl mixed in with those of dogs and horses and the state of the smashed strongly suggests evidence that some cannibalism was practiced at Jamestown during the “starving time” of 1609-10.
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The Powhatan grounds featured the sort of thatch huts in which most of them lived, displaying how spacious such living and storage structures could be, with reasonably high ceilings and wide areas for beds and a central fire with a flap for a chimney exit in the ceiling. Members of the settlement’s staff were on hand to model approximations of native dress and to discuss some of the crafts and skills of the indigenous people. This included cooking chickens, crabs, and oysters, which all smelled delicious and first got our brains focused on the idea that we may be in need of lunch soon. Unfortunately, due to health codes we were not allowed to sample the foods being prepared there. My own experience with Elizabethan era living history back in the summer of 1992 was far less regulated and we had felt free to feed the tourists hard tack and venison we’d cooked in period-appropriate pots and pans on site.
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The staff, while dressed appropriately, did not make any attempt to maintain an illusion that they were actually living in the 1600s, participating in fully instructional conversations about the differences between the foods and technologies and what visitors may have been familiar with. A series of native crafts and games were also presented to keep visitors engaged.
Just a few dozen yards away, the three ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, which have long been the centerpiece of the Jamestown exhibits are docked in a tidy row along a wooden walkway. Their real life counterparts were directed, under the captaincy of Christopher Newport, from England to the Canary Islands off of the western coast of Africa, to stops in the Caribbean, including one in Puerto Rico, and finally into the Chesapeake Bay in the eastern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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The traditional “Union Jack” flag atop the masts of the ships represent the union of England and Scotland which occurred when King James of Scotland ascended to the throne as James I (of the King James Bible) in 1603, just three years prior to the journey’s beginning. These would have been very early examples, because the information I’ve found indicates that the flags were not used at all until April of 1606, and the current version of the Union Jack, incorporating a red saltire cross to represent Ireland, was not officially adopted as the national flag until almost two centuries later in 1801.
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As was my experience on board the Elizabeth II in my early 20s, the relative small size of these vessels impress the difficulties of a trans-Atlantic journey during the era. The decks are exposed to unrelenting sun at times and the twixt decks are typically cramped and often are home to very still air. A presentation aboard one of the ships sought to explain how sailors guided their transportation accurately.
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Another on the dock displayed the variety of foods available to passengers during the five month trip. These included hardened non-leavened breads, peas porridge puddings, cooked sparrows, and the occasional fish.
The final outdoor exhibit is a large scale reproduction of the Jamestown fort, containing multiple structures of different types and featuring all of the necessities for a functioning town of the era. In the following video you can see the interior of the fort from the section in the east corner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoKQQirde4E
This is the structure which was built as a part of the initial 1957 opening of what was at first called “Jamestown Festival Park.” Dignitaries of all sorts including then Vice President Richard Nixon and Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain attended the opening ceremonies.
As you can see the below photo, many of the buildings had thatch roofs, the most common style of roofing in England at the time. Since they are constructed of dry vegetation, these roofs were vulnerable to catching fire and if tightly packed could result in a small fire spreading into a very large blaze damaging whole neighborhoods. Due to this danger, some English localities had outlawed their use, but the practice continued unabated even past the great fire of London of 1666, which had been exacerbated in part by row upon row of very flammable buildings.
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Exhibitions on public health, building strategies, and the cooking fashions of the settlers were presented throughout the Jamestown fort, with staff tending to fires and detailing the specific spots on a person where leeches should be placed in order to fight particular maladies of the day. Below you can see a table full of meat and vegetable pies, breads, cooked fowl, and peas pudding, all pronounced inedible by the staff present, and the consistent presence of flies did not put me in a mind to test the theory. I was pretty certain I would be ready for the late lunch we would surely be purchasing at the welcome center once we were done touring the historical sites.
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A reproduction of a church found at the dig site is also present, featuring an impressive vaulted ceiling.

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One of the more dramatic exhibitions was one which could be heard every once in a while as we toured both the Powhatan settlement and the three sailing vessels. Staff dressed as soldiers and musketeers displayed the loading and firing of the sort of traditional flintlock muskets which would have been used in the defense of the fort in the early seventeenth century. I’d fired such a weapon when I did living history in the early 199os, but like fireworks it’s always fun to hear something go “bang.” Below you can see a demonstration of how musketeers were able to account for the longer loading time of their weapons in comparison to a bow and arrow by firing in organized volleys, giving consistent fire while allowing each man to reload his musket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlbyXqNpck
By decreasing the amount of time between volleys, the settlers were able to discourage advances by aggressive natives whose bow and arrow had a range less than half that of this era of musket.
A quick conversation with a staff member on era-appropriate swords and strategy with them was followed by the traditional farm work of feeding the hens and roosters that were running freely around the fort. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we all agreed that lunch was in order. The cafe on site had plenty to choose from, including meat pies, beer battered cod, burgers, peanut soup, and a variety of other sandwiches and foodstuff. None of it was extraordinary, but it was all reasonably edible and only mildly overpriced considering the fact that they have a relatively captive audience.
If you’re like me and you like a little history with your vacation, the Jamestown Settlement is an indispensable bit of the story of the United States. Our tour lasted just a little more than four hours, so it is not the sort of attraction you should travel from several states away to see on its own, but when you consider the other nearby sights, it can definitely be one of the draws for a larger holiday that could include theme parks, the beach, natural beauty, and plenty more important historical sites. I promise I’m not an employee of the Virginia tourism bureau.
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admin
Admin
admin
8 years ago

Nice; reminds me a little of Old Fort Niagara and the Angola Historical Society from where I live.

RB
RB
8 years ago

Leave it to Daffystardust to not only spend the holiday immersed in history, but to write an article like this. Great Sunday morning read and an oh-so welcome distraction from football, which is what I’ve been immersed in for days.
VA is an enduringly immersive environment for history buffs, no doubt about it. Early 1600s life was so brutal. Was there any information given on the mystery of the Roanoake settlement?

lebeau
Admin
8 years ago

I’m late to the party. A gaggle of girls overtook my man cave this holiday weekend which has put me behind in my reading. Looks like a great get away for a history buff! Terrific trip report. Thanks for sharing.

robbushblog
robbushblog
8 years ago

I always love including history in my vacations. It helps me feel connected to the lives of people long past. Now your question of whether the English coming to America was a good thing? Of course it was. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. There is no reason to hem or haw or feel apologetic about it. I’ve always wanted to visit Jamestown (and Williamsburg) and hope I will get to do so eventually one day. We couldn’t make it there the last time I was in Virginia, but we made sure that we got to see Washington, D.C.,… Read more »

Tami
Tami
8 years ago

Love your site. Enjoyed reading about Jamestown but it made me feel a tad guilty as it is not 15 miles from where I sit and I have yet to take my teenager. Perhaps in the Spring.

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