Jimson Harvest

America’s Most Important Archeological Dig (continued)

2012-01-19T15:29:00.000-08:00

C-Span3 is now airing a three-partAmerican Artifacts series on Jamestown Rediscovery’s archeological dig, profiling what Bill Kelso and his teamhave discovered there since they began some eighteen years ago (1994). Itsvideo vignettes highlight what the colonists accomplished and left us as evidenceof how they founded the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

This evidence helpssupport the growing understanding of Jamestown’s earliest years and the livesof its settlers. It also fosters the realization that they persisted to createa colony that did not disappear, as propaganda created by Civil War-era NewEngland historians and legend weavers have led generations of Americans tofalsely believe.

The first of the series (January 8) relates how the Kelso team persevered for ten years to convince theAssociation for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now Preservation Virginia,or “PV”), the site’s owner since 1893, to allow them to search for and findthe original 1608 James Fort, and what they have learned about it and collectedfrom it. It includes a photo of Kelso’s first day of digging and discovery, andan anecdote of a visitor’s observation. Over a million artifacts have since beenrecovered, analyzed, preserved and cataloged and form the core of the exhibitsat the Voorhees Archaearium.

The first segment now availableat C-Span’s online video library at the link above.

The second segment (January 15) was a tour of JR’s archaeology lab by curator Bly Straube, and is also available at C-0S pan's online video library.

Look for the third andfinal segment on January 22.

If you miss it or can’treceive C-Span3, you can see all three of them on its video library after theyare broadcast.

The Virginia Encyclopedia Remembers John Smith

2012-01-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

Three days ago was the 404^th anniversary of John Smith’s return to Jamestown from his unplanned and enforced visit to Werowocomoco, and his experience with Powhatan and (as he much later notoriously recounted) Pocahontas.

Brendon Wolfe offers some pithy observations and reminders about Smith and Jamestown’s earliest times in his postings on the Encyclopedia ofVirginia’s blog, which is one of the Virginia Foundation for Humanities’ projects.

This is a link that is well worth following.

Toward a Holistic History of Jamestown; A Book Review

2011-12-09T20:47:00.000-08:00

Jordan’s Point, Virginia; Archaeology in Perspective, Prehistoric to Modern Times

by Martha W. McCartney

Virginia Department of Historic Resources (distributed by the University of Virginia Press)

2011

134 p.

Archaeology is belying many long-held educators' and popular beliefs about Jamestown as America's first permanent English colony. A century and a half after New England historians, principally Henry Adams, denigrated and desecrated its heritage and place in our history in the cause of Union superiority, a more factual picture is gradually emerging from Historic Jamestown and other proximate sites.

At America’s most important archaeological dig, Bill Kelso and his Jamestown Discovery team have enabled us to learn about the size and features of James Fort and the first Protestant church in America that both date from 1608. We know where Pocahontas was wed in 1614, who then was to become one of the parents of our nation’s first economic boom with the birth of the tobacco industry, which has continued, like it or not, for almost four centuries. He also has investigated and reported on Kingsmills Plantations, one of Jamestown important proximate settlements.

Martha W. McCartney has now produced a well-researched, wide-sweeping and detailed examination of Jordan’s Point, another important early contemporaneous outpost up the James River from Jamestown. In nine chapters over 134 richly illustrated pages, she relates archaeological findings that explore its history from prehistoric to our own times. She also interweaves a needed historical context of the colony’s beginnings and formational events with descriptions of who was living and what was happening at Jordan’s Point, along with results of the archaeology that was performed there from the 1930’s into the 1990’s.

She begins by telling us about what has been found of the indigenous inhabitants of this peninsula just east of the convergence of the Appomattox with the James. This a formidable start for the average reader, who must plow though detail that is replete with arcane reference points about Native American dwellings, graves and other sites. Then she unfolds her more readable contextual chronicle of Jamestown’s early years in the following chapters on the continuing history of Jordan’s Point.

One of her features is the two-page reproduction of a rare, colored version of John Smith’s extraordinary 1612 map of Virginia. It offers a unique opportunity to appreciate its accuracy and detail that are useful even today, as it was used to settle geographical disputes well into the nineteenth century. Now preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, it is the best example of the quality of the book’s many fine illustrations. Many of these are of artifacts recovered by highly respected archaeologists that help us understand what daily living implements were then employed. Among them are well done renditions by Jamie May, Senior Staff Archaeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery.

Her following chapters describe how Samuel Jordan, an Ancient Planter who arrived in 1611, established his “substantial” settlement (“Jordan’s Journey”) in 1620 with 450 acres from his (and his wife’s) entitlements under the headright system, and then relate its history down to 1986, together with the archaeological findings. She offers good evidence of how the settlers lived, their economic status and relationships with neighbors. Jordan appears to have had some stature in what was then the small Jamestown community as reflected in his providing refuge, following the March 1622 Indian attack, to nearby settlers from Berkeley Hundred, Causey’s Care, Westover and Chaplins Choice and other outposts.

She continues with what happens after Samuel Jordan’s 1623 death, his widow’s defense of a breach of promise suit by a spurned suitor and her subsequent marriage to William Farrar, a former neighbor and plantation owner, and offers an account of “The Archaeology of Jordan’s Journey” together with a history of mid-17^th century Jamestown. She then arrives at the somewhat ambiguous assumption of its ownership by the Bland family, prominent and influential London merchants, from Captain Benjamin Siddway and his wife, the widow of Benjamin Harrison II.

Again, however, when reading about archeological findings from this era, the average reader should be prepared for another appearance of arcane archaeological reference points that relate the discovery of key Jordan’s Point artifacts.

McCartney then documents Jamestown’s late 17^th century history, and how the Bland family developed Jordan’s Point into prosperous plantation in the 18^thand Richard Bland II prominently served Virginia in the years leading up to the Revolution. She goes on to recount the Blands’ lifestyles from accounts of their estate inventories and the subdivision of Jordan’s Point for distribution among Richard bland IV’s children in the early 19^th century. She continues with how the Blands held the property up until the Civil War.

The book concludes with her account of Tidewater events and the undetermined destruction of the plantation’s major buildings during the War. She then relates the disposition of the property by Bland heirs in the late 19^th century, and its acquisition by the City of Hopewell in the 20^th.

This book is an important testament to the need to explore, document and characterize other proximate settlements before modern development obscures and destroys all evidence of their heritage. This has happened at Jordan’s Point, which has been obliterated by “Jordan on the James.”

The reader would have been better served with an index and a list of illustrations and maps with the table of Contents. Equally, there should have been an earlier introduction of a regional map locating Jordan’s Point; the first one (as a detail from the John Smith map) appears at page 17, and the first modern (and small) one at page 42. The archaeological reference points could have used some kind of indexing or comprehensible locators on maps. In addition, McCartney would have benefited from some judicious editing.

These are but minor points. All in all, this is a useful book for anyone seriously interested in a gaining a more holistic understanding of Jamestown’s history.

Another Facet In Viewing Jamestown

2011-12-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Apropos of our postings on Karen Kupperman’s Washington Post op-ed and that of Peter Mancall in Bloomberg offering another view of the First Thanksgiving, we overlooked Daniel Honan’s The First Thanksgiving: Reclaiming Jamestown From the Dustbin ofHistory. Honan offers yet another facet in viewing our American origins.

Honan observes how the ignorance of Jamestown heritage has been providing misguided political fodder to those who should know better. This is an excellent piece that helps open eyes to just how important Jamestown was.

Daniel Honan is a contributor to Think Tank, an online blog at Big Think, a "digital "knowledge forum."

Why Jamestown Was The Secret To Success

2011-11-27T11:09:00.000-08:00

On reading Peter Mancall’s op-ed in the 11/22 edition of Bloomberg, we thought it was worth revisiting the following piece by Professor Karen Kupperman, which appeared in the Washington Post at the 400^th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown:

America's Founding Fictions

By Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Washington Post

Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02

The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.

Ah, of course, you're thinking -- Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It's the creation story from hell. But think again.

That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts's Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation's founding.

These aren't the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth's more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn't be.

American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans' arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop's "city on a hill," clinched it for Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.

Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good. Sometimes it even makes the connection directly. Two days before Thanksgiving 2004, U.S., Iraqi and British troops began a major offensive south of Baghdad. The name chosen for the campaign? Operation Plymouth Rock.

But America's true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.

Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown's first couple of years, the colony's London sponsor, the Virginia Company -- a kind of early venture-capital outfit -- decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it.

In fact, martial law did stabilize the colony (although many ran away to take up life with the Chesapeake Algonquins). But it couldn't foster true community development or create a thriving economy. Yet over the next several years, some colonists and backers came up with a different approach -- and laid the foundations for what America is today. They substituted incentives for iron control. The land was divvied up among the colonists; a representative assembly gave landowners control of taxation; women were recruited as wives for planters; and the professional soldiers were removed.

And voila. The colony began to grow. To get a stake in this new society, young men and women were willing to take on the burden of working as indentured servants for a number of years.

The new design was in place by 1619, 12 years after the first colonists arrived. Life was still hard and major conflict with the Indians soon came, but the essential elements of success were in place. Every colony from that point forward followed the Jamestown pattern. The Pilgrims, who came in 1620, began as a communal experiment, but within four years, they, too, demanded division of the land and began to disperse into family groups.

Americans ever since have moved across the country in pursuit of the dream of land ownership, the innovation inaugurated on the James River. And they have prided themselves on the ingenuity that also surfaced first in Jamestown, where John Rolfe defied the odds by learning how to produce a marketable tobacco crop that became the colony's gold.

Of course, there was a tragic downside, as there is to many success stories. As colonists north and south hacked their farms out of the wilderness, they ruined the Indians' agricultural and hunting economy and forced the natives off their land. And ownership of property soon extended to ownership of labor, as Native Americans and imported Africans were enslaved in both New England and the South.

The truth of our history is that it produced winners and losers. Our founding is not a storybook Pilgrim fable. It's something hardier and more complicated. And it's reflected in Jamestown's great accomplishment: that it was the place where English men and women worked through the messiness of real life in dire circumstances and found the secret to success in building a society -- giving everyone a stake in the outcome.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York University and the author of "The Jamestown Project."

According to Peter C. Mancall, the Pilgrims gave thanks, and then gave up on peace

2011-11-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

“The first Thanksgiving, as history textbooks have informed generations of students, brought the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony together with local Algonquian-speaking Indians in 1621. Natives and newcomers shared a harvest meal, which most likely included maize (“Indian corn”), various root crops, turkey and venison,” begins historian Peter Mancall’s op-ed in the November 22 edition of Bloomberg.

However, those times later deteriorated into "...war with the Pequots, the original inhabitants of modern- day Rhode Island and southwestern Connecticut, because they feared these natives were preparing to drive the settlers out. At the height of the war, the English and their Narragansett allies surrounded a Pequot village on the banks of the Mystic River, set it on fire and slew the Indians who ran for their lives."

Professor Mancall also relates how one Thomas Morton vainly tried to ameliorate Puritan/Indian relations, was deemed "profane" and almost a heretic, burned out of his house and banished three times, including back to England.

Peter C. Mancall is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and the Director of the USC-Huntington Library’s Early Modern Studies Institute. He is also is the author of “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson -- A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic” and is now writing “American Origins,” which will be Volume 1 of the Oxford History of the United States.

To read the entire piece, click on the headline above or go to:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-23/pilgrims-gave-thanks-then-gave-up-on-peace-commentary-by-peter-c-mancall.html

The New York Times Rediscovers Jamestown

2011-11-14T12:21:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has profiled William Kelso’s perseverance and dedication to teaching us about the significance of Jamestown Rediscovery’s progress at America’s most important archeological site.

In its 11/14 issue, Theo Emery reviews the findings and interpretations stemming from what has been found and what will be explored at the site of the 1608 church where Pocahontas and John Rolfe were wed. It follows the lead of the Wall Street Journal back in 2010 and other similar subsequent accounts that we have been posting in past months.

This is evidence of growing recognition of the importance and impact of Jamestown on our national heritage and how it created the foundations of our nation. Jamestown Rediscovery is a key to enhancing and effecting understanding of our history and what happened there that has contributed to our national character as it has developed and we know it today.

Emery poses the issue of religion as a major function of the colony in parallel with its backers' and founders' commercial and exploratory goals. It also contrasts the difference of that issue between Jamestown and the yet-to-be settled Plymouth, which is such an important feature of our national founding mythology.

You can link to Emery’s New York Times' article by clicking on the above headline or go to

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/ruins-of-oldest-us-protestant-church-may-be-at-jamestown.html.

Before there was a Jamestown...

2011-10-12T16:32:00.000-07:00

Jamestown had its antecedents in the explorations and expeditions to North Carolina’s Outer banks: the Roanoke colonies (including the "lost" colony.) The First Colony Foundation’s recent research at Fort Raleigh and surrounding area has used ground penetrating radar and other new technologies to discover evidence of the colonies and their settlers. Other research has led historians to conclude that, but for a 1586 hurricane, the earlier group of them may have gone on to settle in Chesapeake Bay about two decades before the landing at Jamestown.

First Colony’s website is well worth visiting and strongly complements the emerging pictures of Jamestown’s early years that are being uncovered at Historic Jamestown that William Kelso will review in the final presentation of the 2011 Jamestown Lecture Series on Tuesday, October 25, at 5:30 p.m. at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, VA.

A New Find at the First Church at Jamestowne

2011-09-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

The dig of the first church at Jamestowne (c.1608) has produced an intriguing find with the uncovering of a previously unknown well within the perimeter of the edifice where it is believed that Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married in 1614 (see our posts of August 2010 and Historic Jamestown’s website.)

Eric Pesola of the Williamsburg/Yorktown Daily has given us an update with an video interview with archeologist Danny Schmidt of Historic Jamestown.

Jamestown’s Seawall Was Damaged

2011-09-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

Among the results of damages from Hurricane Irene were the Corps of Engineers’ seawall fronting the James River at Historic Jamestowne. Here are some pictures, as well as a YouTube report from their website. It seems obvious that there has possibly been serious erosion in back of the structure. Note the Dale House to the right. (Photos courtesy of Andrew Zellers-Frederick, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

First California Company's 2011 Annual Meeting

2011-09-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

The Jamestowne Society's First California Company's has posted a report on its 2011 annual meeting on its blog/newsletter.

There is also a post announcing that First California Company member Billy Pittard has been named the new Chairman of the Department of Electronic Media Communication at Middle Tennessee State University.

In Irene’s Wake….

2011-09-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

While there was relatively good news about Irene (it wasn’t as devastating as had been feared), it has caused or exacerbated some major problems. There was still a lot of damage from the hurricane. There are power problems with the site; having only partial electricity service has been affecting several facilities (see Historic Jamestown’s Face book site at http://www.facebook.com/historicjamestowne).

Since the power was down for several days, several objects in the collection (especially metals) may have some negative exposure. The 1906 seawall was also damaged in several places and the Church Tower likely suffered damage. This confirms that Jamestown Rediscovery needs a full size generator (about $100K or a little more) for a secure and reliable power supply at the site; especially for the museum (Archaearium) and lab.

Relatively Good News About Irene

2011-08-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

The initial word from Historic Jamestown is that there was less flooding from Irene than from Isabella in 2003. We’re awaiting more information with assessments and specifics, but our guess is that there were excellent lessons learned from Isabella that translated into more robust and skilled preparations (e.g., see the Dale House in the background.)

Jamestown Rediscovery Takes Hurricane Protective Measures

2011-08-26T16:51:00.000-07:00

Jamestown Rediscovery describes the measures it has taken to protect its archeological work from approaching hurricane Irene on its Facebook page (click on the headline.)

They also promise an update after effects and damages are assessed.

Irene Has Serious Damage Potential for Jamestown Rediscovery

2011-08-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

On the heels of our latest post, we are told that Irene's storm models are not looking very good. It appears the Jamestown dig might be directly in the path of the storm. 2003's Hurricane Isabel severely damaged the site and Irene has similar attributes, if not worse.

Jamestown Rediscovery's staff are taking all the precautions they can. Several of the archaeological excavations are covered with tarps and weighted down with heavy sandbags. The site which was the extension of the fort’s wall had been reburied. The big problem will be the 1608 church site which is so close to the river and so large.

One of the concerns is the stability of the mid-17th century church tower, the only remaining significant colonial structure on the island. There may be a need to fund its repair, which could also offer the opportunity to determine a more exact date of its construction, which has been a mystery.

America’s Most Important Archeological Dig

2011-08-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

After seventeen years, Jamestown Rediscovery’s archeological dig is arguably the most important in America.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is managing Historic Jamestown for Preservation Virginia (formerly APVA) and has added a new dimension to Jamestown Rediscovery. For example, the summer edition of its Journal features two articles that should be of interest to any student of Jamestown.

The first is James Fort, Lost and Found, by Dr. William Kelso, who briefly reprises his 2006 book, Jamestown, The Buried Truth, then gives us his own insightful update and account of the astounding discovery of the first Protestant church in America, the original 1608 church at Jamestown. This is a must read.

Kelso and his team used the description of the church by William Strachey, a scribe aboard the ill-fated Sea Venture, who then spent two years c. 1611-12 at Jamestown recording much of what we know today. His measurements and narrative of the church offered Kelso clues that led to establishing its size and location.

It is possible to see just where Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married, and so many other significant events that took place roughly from 1608-1617. We recently experienced that eerie sensation of being so close to the physical place where those events occurred and encourage all of our readers to do the same before the dig season is over.

The size and location of the church are graphically depicted on the Historical Jamestown web site.

The second article is especially relevant for those who attended our recent San Diego presentation on the Pace family at Jamestowne, where we referred to their life under the colony’s near-martial law, also as recorded by Strachey. In Upon Paine of Death; The Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, archeologist Ivor Noel Hume details the scope, purpose and function of the severe laws that governed the colony from 1611 until the rule of common law was introduced by the Virginia Company of London in 1618. Hume also comments that at least one of their remnants was employed until well into the nineteenth century.

Put Yourself Into the Shoes of the Original Jamestown Colonists

2011-08-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

If you’re near Charlotte, NC between now and October 2, you can engage in an “immersing educational experience set in 1607 Virginia that puts visitors into the shoes of the original Jamestown colonists.” We were alerted to this Stephanie at

http://www.thecharlottemoms.com/survivor-jamestown-will-survive/

For information, go to

http://www.charlottemuseum.org/

See: Exhibits: Survive: Jamestown

Update: The Paces - Pioneers at Jamestown and Points West

2011-07-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

For a synopsis of our presentation at the June 18 meeting of First California Company of the Jamestowne Society, go to http://fccjamestowne.blogspot.com/

Part one: Seeking Early Opportunity in Jamestown; and part two, On From Jamestowne, by Martha Pace Gresham.

Seeking Early Opportunity in Jamestown

2011-05-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

The attraction of Jamestown was opportunity. One of the earliest families to settle was that of Richard and Isabella Pace and their young son, George. Both were investors in the Virginia Company of London and were among the recipients of the first headrights or land grants.

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company will present two of their descendants, Martha Pace Gresham and your editor, to provide insights into their lives and contributions to Jamestown’s survival and development. We will discuss what drove emigration from England to Virginia, how the settlers lived in those early days and what they did to help create the foundation for our American nation.

Saturday June 18, 2011, San Diego Yacht Club: 12:00 noon – 2:30 pm. Luncheon: $30. Please make reservations by June 10, 2011

For more details, go to First California Company’s web site at

http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/june2011.php

or its newsletter/blog at

http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/june2011.php

Questions: Call Ginny Gotlieb 818-635-5764 or email fccjamestownegov@gmail.com

Another “New” Story of Jamestown

2011-03-01T15:56:00.000-08:00

2011 has brought another new account of Jamestown’s first two decades. If you have never read anything about the first permanent English colony in America, this could be a place to start.

In his new book, The Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results That Shaped America, Tony Williams retells its story from its founding until it became a royal province. He covers much of what Warren Billings told us two decades ago in his Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation. It also should not be confused with the late Alf J. Mapp, Jr.’s. 1985 work, The Virginia Experiment; The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America; 1607-1781.

Williams gives us a bit more detail and color than those chronicles and offers his interpretations of the unfolding events in an able storyteller’s voice that are helpful to a novice to early American colonial history, his apparent audience. However, he offers few new insights into the story he recounts or how we achieved the results mentioned in his subtitle.

Since those older accounts were published, there have been major archaeological, anthropological and sociological discoveries that shine new light on what happened there. Examples include the excavation of James Fort, the artifacts found in John Smith’s well and early settlers’ graves. He makes no use of developments that are now helping us understand not only what happened but confirm what some lesser-recognized original sources related at the time.

As a Kirkus reviewer puts it, “Williams tells the tale competently enough, but he does not adequately address the complex back story of the colony and its relations with the native peoples of the Chesapeake Bay, which hinge on matters anthropological, economic and geopolitical. For that, we have other recent, superior books such as David A. Price's Love and Hate in Jamestown (2003) and Camilla Townsend's Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004), which fill in the considerable blanks here. [This may be] literate and occasionally engaging, but those earlier books should be the reader's first choices.”

To them, we would add, among others, Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s The Jamestown Project (2007 and see our posting of January 2010) and Seth Mallios’s The Deadly Politics of Giving (2006).

For the entire Kirkus Review, go to
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/non-fiction/tony-williams/jamestown-experiment/

The Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results That Shaped America; by Tony Williams
Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4022-4353-0
Page count: 320pp
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Jamestown Rediscovery on Facebook

2011-02-27T14:38:00.000-08:00

Historic Jamestowne (Preservation Virginia’s Jamestown Rediscovery dig) is now offering frequent updates, announcements and news of local events and comments at Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/historicjamestowne.

Note: Be sure you’re using a compatible browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari or MS Internet Explorer.

Jamestowne Society Mortgage paid in full!

2011-02-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Jamestowne Society has announced that it has paid off the mortgage of its headquarters building in Richmond, according to a 2/13 announcement on its website at http://www.jamestowne.org/Jamestowne_Society_Whats_New.htm

Dr. Michael D. Frost, Lieutenant Governor of the Society, established the 2010 Challenge Grant and matched contributions by several Jamestowne Society Companies and members. The Challenge Grant ended December 31, 2010. First California Company was a contributor.

First California Company Posts New Reading List on Its Web Site

2011-02-10T10:58:00.000-08:00

Jamestowne Society's First California Company has revised its recommended reading list and posted it on its web site (click the link on the above headline). The site says:

"We encourage learning about our Jamestown ancestors and how they survived and contributed to the founding of our nation. As a start, we have compiled this list of recent books that offer the results of research into the establishment of the first permanent English colony in America.

"We have been fortunate that several eminent historians and archaeologists have made presentations at our meetings. We recommend their works as among the most authoritative on Jamestown’s era. Their books, and the others below, are available from public libraries, many bookstores and online."

Colonial Williamsburg acquires historic Spanish letters describing threat at Jamestown

2010-12-27T10:45:00.000-08:00

From the 12/26 issue of Archaeology Daily News:

Two rare early 1600s letters expressing Spanish King Phillip III's fears about the new English settlement at Jamestown have been given to Colonial Williamsburg by a best selling crime writer.

Patricia Cornwell, whose interest in the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project dates back more than a decade, acquired the historic letters several years ago at the New York auction of an old Spanish family archive.

Written shortly after the English founded the Virginia colony in 1607, both share the king's worries with Alonso Perez du Guzman - the seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia - a prominent noble and naval commander who led the Spanish Armada's legendary attack against England in 1588.

"Philip III of Spain was concerned the English would create a base in Virginia to attack Spanish ships in the Atlantic," said Doug Mayo, associate librarian of Colonial Williamsburg's John D. Rockefeller Library, where the letters will be kept.

"He is afraid that the English are not only going to attack the Atlantic but raid as far as the Pacific and New Spain - or Mexico - as well."

Cornwell's best-selling crime novels include such titles as Scarpetta, The Book of the Dead and The Front.

The Richmond-based author has been an avid follower of the Jamestown excavation for many years, funding an intensive forensic study of early burials that shed new light on the struggles of the settlers during the near-catastrophic winter of 1609-10 - known as the "Starving Time."

"The excavation of Jamestown produces a wealth of forensics about America's past," Cornwell said.

"It is all about how we began, who we were and who we are and why. I can't think of a more worthy and exciting project, and I'm so happy I've been able to participate in it over the years."

Cornwell's interest in donating the letters first surfaced about six months ago when she approached archaeologist William M. Kelso, director of the Jamestown Rediscovery project.

Her gift reflects a new collaboration between Colonial Williamsburg and Preservation Virginia - formerly the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities - that owns the site of the historic settlement and initiated the pioneering archaeological excavation in 1994.

"She asked me where the letters would do the most good," Kelso said. "And it just made sense - with this new collaboration - to send them to the Rockefeller Library."

To read this article and see a picture of one of the letters, click on the above headline or go to:

http://www.archaeologydaily.com/news/201012265830/Colonial-Williamsburg-acquires-historic-Spanish-letters-describing-threat-at-Jamestown.html

Archaeology Magazine Honors the Jamestown Church Among the Top Ten Discoveries of 2010

2010-12-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

In its online January/February 2011 edition of Archeology, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has honored Bill Kelso and the Jamestowne Rediscovery Project for its unearthing of the original 1608 church at Jamestowne as one of the Top 10 Discoveries of 2010 (see our reports of this discovery beginning August 27 up through October 26). The commentary includes this Kelso quote: “Now we can actually point to the spot where Pocahontas got married. How often does something like that happen in archaeology?”

The AIA is North America's oldest and largest organization devoted to the world of archaeology. The Institute is a nonprofit group founded in 1879 and chartered by the United States Congress in 1906.

To read this tribute, please go to

http://www.archaeology.org/1101/topten/virginia.html

Observing Christmas at Jamestowne

2010-12-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company's blog has posted two articles by Virginia McCartney (see our postings re its 10/23 meeting) on how Christmas was observed by the settlement’s founders and early residents.

See The Virginia colonists’ first recorded Christmas and Twelfth Night in Colonial Virginia by clicking on the headline above or at
http://fccjamestowne.blogspot.com/

We add National Geographic’s Jamestown Site to our Links

2010-11-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

We’ve added a link to National Geographic magazine’s interactive site to our list (below) as one of the more comprehensive and informative online sources for anyone wanting to learn about Jamestown.

It offers a wide variety of features, such as a tour of what Historic Jamestown (Jamestown Rediscovery) has found in the original fort, a gallery of photographs of artifacts recovered from the dig, and the insights and interpretations of several scholars, such as William Kelso, Beverly Straube, Ivor Noel Hume, James Horn and Seth Mallios. Examples of their comments include who the colonists were and why they came to Virginia, their skeletal remains that tell us about them, and the trading and gift-giving customs and patterns with and among the indigenous people.

One feature examines the ecology and environment of the times and the impact on them of the arrival of not only the English and European settlers, but what they brought with them that were not known in America, such as the honey bee as well as the more notorious bacterial and viral diseases. Charles Mann, the author of The Legacy of Jamestown; America Found and Lost in the May, 2007 National Geographic (Vol. 211, No. 8), provides an interesting interview on comments on these, among other issues.

Another feature is an examination of those indigenous Powhatan tribes and Werowocomoco, their ancestral seat of power that has been discovered after 400 years (and believed to where John Smith may have been detained, according to his account).

The most recent posting on the site reports on the discovery of some interesting personalized pipes with Indian-English designs may bear earliest known printing in English America and may have been created to promote the incipient settlement among its London backers.

Go to:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101129-jamestown-personalized-pipes-virginia-history-colonial-america/

This Year’s Take on Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T18:57:00.000-08:00

As we once again put our turkeys on our tables, we’re also seeing the annual appearance of some political turkeys for us to carve up as well. As usual, the fat oozing from their agendas tends to disguise the true flavor of the truths about our long-observed holiday.

This year’s crop of those turkeys is presented by Kate Zernicke in her 11/20 piece, “The Pilgrims Were ... Socialists?” in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/weekinreview/21zernike.html (or click on the headline of this posting).

She reminds us that we again have had the touting of the theory that Jamestown had to be saved from being a “socialist” enterprise because the land was originally owned communally and the settlers labored for the backers of the settlement. That theory overlooks the fact that the backers were the stockholders of the profit-motivated Virginia Company (which owned the land) and those settlers were their employees.

The settlers became colonists and, before 1618, the land was distributed as grants ("headrights") to those that were "Ancient Planters" (and among the Virginia Company's stockholders as a dividend in lieu of unrealized profits). Their ability (and of those that followed them) to freely buy, sell and trade that land amongst them and others was the instigation of our real estate industry.

The same holds true for a similar theory concerning the Plymouth colony that is our annual cultural focus this time of year. The voyagers on the Mayflower were backed by the same Virginia Company that was seeking a profit as they were in Jamestown, the religious Separatists’ convictions of about half of them notwithstanding.

Stephen Hopkins’ Spoon

2010-11-16T22:54:00.000-08:00

Stephen Hopkins was a noteworthy early American colonist, having been one of the castaways from the Sea Venture’s 1609 shipwreck on Bermuda, and who arrived as short time resident of Jamestown after the Starving Times in 1610 and as a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620. (See our posts on accounts of the Sea Venture on 10/31/10 and August 21 and October 2, 2009). However, he doesn’t appear in Martha McCartney’s classic compendium of Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635, as he was back in England by 1617. McCartney shows only a Hopkins - sans Christian name - as a "minister's clerk" who sought to ship out from England for Jamestowne in 1622, after Stephen Hopkins had arrived in Massachusetts.

Michael Edds has posted an interesting article about Hopkins on his blog, The Final Great Awakening, which chronicles a family heirloom that has come down in his wife's family from Hopkins. He says, “The story centers on an old silver spoon, which has been handed down to the youngest daughter of each generation in her family. So the tale goes, the spoon came over on the Mayflower in the possession of one of its passengers, Stephen Hopkins. However, lost in the mists of time has been the reason for giving the spoon to the youngest female in each generation.”

Read more by clicking on the headline above or go to:

http://greatawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/thanksgiving-spoon.html

"The Lost Colony May Be Found"

2010-11-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

Among the objectives for the Jamestown adventurers was ascertaining the fate of the Lost Colony at Roanoke. The speculation on what happened has been wide-ranging over the centuries and there have been recent digs and reports of artifact findings that may have begun to shine some light on what may have happened.

There is even a web site devoted to it (Lost Colony Research Group: http://the-lost-colony.blogspot.com). They have posted an 11/1 article by Erin James of the Virginian-Pilot headlined “The Lost Colony May Be Found” that reports on Scott Dawson, who feels he has discovered reasonable inferences that the colony may have sought refuge with and been accommodated by a friendly indigenous tribe.

Dawson opened the Hatteras Histories and Mysteries Museum in Buxton, NC in April 2010 after the productive dig near Buxton (formerly a Croatoan tribal settlement) by a team from the University of Bristol in the city of the same name in England. To read the article, click on the headline above or go to

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/lost-colony-may-now-be-found?cid=mc

Everyman’s History Book Group will discuss "A Brave Vessel" on 11/08/2010 at 7 PM.

2010-10-31T10:08:00.000-07:00

William Strachey was an important observer and chronicler of early Jamestown, but is best known for having had his account of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture used by William Shakespeare for The Tempest. His observations have become a major tool for modern archaeologists in learning about one of Jamestown’s most important buildings.

Sent to Jamestown in 1609 with the new leadership to replace John Smith, the Sea Venture was the flagship of an eight-vessel fleet that was dispatched by the Virginia Company to help further develop England’s new settlement on the banks of the James River.

En route, it was almost destroyed by a hurricane and separated from the fleet, but was miraculously stranded on rocks off Bermuda, viewed and avoided by 17th century sailors as a mysterious and supposedly dangerous island. From his passenger’s perspective, Strachey wrote a “meticulous account of the tragedy, the castaways' time in Bermuda, and their arrival in a devastated Jamestown, remains among the most vivid writings of the early colonial period.”

He went on to spend a year as secretary of the Jamestown settlement, and is Woodward’s subject in A Brave Vessel. Woodward describes his role in both our early American colonial history and literature (see our posts of August 21 and October 2. 2009.)

Most recently, Strachey’s observations about the size and design of Jamestown’s first church have guided William Kelso and the Jamestown Rediscovery team at Historic Jamestown in ascertaining its site, which may have been where Pocahontas was married in 1614 (see our posts of August 27 and October 26, 2010.)

Everyman’s History Book Group, which meets at The Book Works at Flower Hill in Del Mar, CA, will discuss A Brave Vessel at its next meeting on Monday, November 8 at 7 PM.

For more information, go to http://www.book-works.com/event/everymans-history-book-group-discusses-brave-vessel-hobson-woodward

First California Company's 10/23 Meeting Was a Great Success

2010-10-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

As we posted on September 24, Martha M. McCartney offered fascinating insights into the lives of some of Jamestowne's 5,500 surviving colonists during its early decades in her compelling lecture to the First California Company of the Jamestowne Society on Saturday, October 23.

Her audience of fifty-five members of the Society and guests assembled from all over California to hear her, and enjoy the clear views of UCLA and west Los Angeles and a superb luncheon in the Regency Club’s top floor in Westwood overlooking UCLA and West Los Angeles.

She related her early career background in identifying potential sites that had archaeological significance for mitigation for development along the James River, and how that morphed into delving into and compiling the biographies of the colonists. These became the source of her many articles on their lives and her classic book, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635, as well as two new books due out next year.

Mc Cartney reiterated some history familiar to the group, that of Jamestowne’s first three decades, but emphasized how the extraordinary drought of 1606-12 created desperate conditions for both the new immigrants and indigenous people. The increased salinity of the James River severely compromised drinking water supplies and food crops that exacerbated tensions of both groups in trying to survive.

"Our October meeting was one to remember" is the headline on the posting on the Jamestowne Society's First California Company blog (its new form of newsletter).

Billy Pittard, FCC's editor, reported, "With an outstanding speaker, a stunning venue, and a packed house," First California Company's October meeting was, "by all accounts, one to remember."

"Research historian and author Martha W. McCartney presented a tantalizing view of the early settlers at Jamestowne. Through her many years of research relating to the Jamestowne settlement, she discovered a number of unique resources and methodologies to compensate for the loss of courthouse records during the Civil War. In so doing, one of her methods was to develop profiles and records on individual settlers. Her book, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary is one of the fruits of this unique methodology. Her detailed accounts of events in the lives of specific individuals gave her presentation at our meeting a sense of immediacy and intimacy. Her presentation was also supported with a rich collection of maps and illustrations."

For more, including photos, go to http://fccjamestowne.blogspot.com/

“Where Pocahontas Said, 'I Do'”

2010-10-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

This is the title of the Wall Street Journal’s October 23, 2010 article (at page C14) on the church dig at Historic Jamestown, as we have been reporting in our posts on August 27. If you click on this post's headline, it should come up. Otherwise, WSJ policies preclude us from including it here, but you should be able to find it at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023804575566090308300052.html

Martha M. McCartney to address Jamestowne’s Society’s First California Company on October 23

2010-09-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

Martha McCartney, the author of Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635, will appear before the First California Company of the Jamestowne Society on Saturday, October 23 in Los Angeles. She will discuss her insights and background on her research into those first settlers in the context of life at early Jamestown.

Her meticulous research puts flesh on genealogical data. She is the author of four books and many published articles and reports that soon will include her observations on the Starving Time and the 1622 Indian attacks on the colony.

Virginia Immigrants has become a standard reference on Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in America, with biographical profiles and data about its earliest residents and backers. Her newest book that extends her research findings through 1699 will be published later this year. It will include biographical data on residents and all who came to Jamestown on public business, such as service as a Burgess, through 1699 when the colonial capital was moved to Williamsburg.

McCartney has been a scholar for the Virginia Research Center for Archaeology and a consultant to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary.

This will be a unique opportunity for anyone interested in or needing to know about early American colonial history to learn about less familiar facets of our nation’s genesis. This will be Ms. McCartney’s first speaking engagement here in many years.

This program will be given at First California Company's luncheon meeting at the Regency Club, 10900 Wilshire Boulevard, in Westwood, Los Angeles at 11 AM.

This will be the next in the series of First California Company's programs by prominent early American colonial historians such as Drs. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Peter Mancall and Seth Mallios.

For more information, go to First California’s website at

http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/oct2010.php

Or

Contact Ginny Gotlieb, First California Company’s Governor at

FCCJamestowneGov@gmail.com

What’s Jamestown’s Future?

2010-09-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

Many of those of us with ancestors at Jamestown have enjoyed the opportunity to tread where they lived; some us have even been able to visit the sites of their homes. Now, we find it discomforting to contemplate that our own descendants may not have these opportunities.

Coming on the heels of news of the possible discovery of the settlement’s first church, there is now speculation that global climate change and rising ocean levels may inundate much of Jamestown island in the coming century. What will it be like for its 450th or 500th anniversaries?

As difficult as this may be to imagine, the earliest reports by John Smith, Gabriel Archer and others told of Virginia’s wintry climate and described its frigid weather and chipping through ice to fish and land and launch their boats. At the same time, London chroniclers were describing religious processions crossing the frozen Thames River. It was certainly much colder then than today’s Virginian and London winters.

Four centuries later, we know that the level of Chesapeake Bay and the James River have risen about three feet and the probable mooring place for the first landing fleet is well offshore from the site of the recently uncovered James Fort. Jamestown was then on a peninsula; it has since become an island. While some of the Fort has been eroded, much of it remains, but is on the river’s edge. It would not have been constructed at such an exposed and insecure position.

William Kelso vividly relates the story of rediscovering the Fort, Jamestown’s earliest years and the lives and habits of those settlers in his fascinating book, Jamestown; The Buried Truth; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2006.) What we learn from him is a critical part of our American heritage that we have a chance of losing.

He tells of two British tourists who interrupted his very early dig and asked what he was finding. When told it was “only” a stain in the dirt (evidence of the Fort), one of them posited whether he should find something more permanent, such as ruins or “…something real?” Kelso answered, “No, there was just dirt. But you know what else? I guess plenty of, well, just hope.” “Brilliant, indeed,” the tourists responded unanimously.

Global warming and climate change is one of the great controversies of our time and its rhetoric raises inordinate political hackles. However, no matter what your own outlook on this, should we not err to help assure that we preserve what we have learned about our nation’s genesis and our ancestors’ legacies to us? We have nothing to lose if we generously support those preservation efforts; we may lose everything if we don’t.

For more about the speculation about Jamestown’s future, go to:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/09/climate-change-threatens-historic-jamestown-va/1

http://anniekatec.blogspot.com/2010/09/report-historic-jamestown-could-be.html

http://www.nrdc.org/media/2010/100901.asp

New Blog From Jamestowne Society's First California Company

2010-08-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company has transformed its newsletter into a blog at http://fccjamestowne.blogspot.com/

This move should help attract younger prospective members and give both the Company and Society a more contemporary appearance.

According to editor and blog master Billy Pittard, “It is our hope that this blog will provide a better way to stay in touch with our members between meetings. We hope this blog can become our primary vehicle for communication about events, meetings, and any kind of news we believe may be of interest to our members.”

The initial postings on the blog cover First California Company’s presence at the June 2010 Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, new member Mary Weisiger Andeen‘s Pocahontas’ brooch and our recent posting on reports from Historic Jamestown on the explorations of what may be the settlers’ first church.

Progress on the Church Dig

2010-08-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally with our post on the news of the possible discovery of the 1608 first church at Jamestown, Historic Jamestown published its own August update that has some fascinating glimpses of the archaeologists' results and where they are going. This is exciting for all of us who have been following the dig over the past decade or so. Go to http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/

Has the Original Jamestown Church Been Found?

2010-08-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Historic Jamestown’s July update (http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/) gave us the news about a “…series of postholes thought to date to the fort period. The postholes are remarkable in their depth and diameter, indicating they supported a very substantial structure…. While excavating any fort-period structure is exciting, this building's potential for expansive size has created a buzz among the archaeologists. What have they found? August's excavations are bound to yield more clues.”

Now comes Steve Vaughan’s report in the Virginia Gazette that this find may be the site of the first Jamestown church (1608), where “Virginia's first resident governor, Sir Thomas West, Lord De La Warre, addressed colonists on June 12, 1610, when his timely arrival saved the colony from abandonment,” and Pocahontas and John Rolfe may have been wed.

He tells us that “Dr. William Kelso, director of archaeology at Historic Jamestowne, was ecstatic. ‘If confirmed, this is a tremendous discovery,’ he said last week. ‘At long last, the heart of James Fort and the scene of so many known seminal events in the history of Jamestown’.

“Initially, Kelso had believed that the original church site was close to the existing church, theorizing that churches are seldom moved because the ground has been consecrated and bodies buried there. That theory was abandoned when it became clear that the current church tower sits astride one of the original palisade walls. The walls were moved as the settlement expanded.”

We’re learning more and more about the genesis of our nation at Jamestown.

For the complete story, go to
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/virginia-news/2010/aug/27/jame27-ar-475159/

'CSI Jamestown'

2010-06-05T11:03:00.001-07:00

The National Academy of Sciences is playing a role in completing the picture of the hardships and tribulations of Jamestown’s earliest settlers in coping with the environment in establishing the new colony.

In stories ranging from the Academy’s Proceedings to Science News and the Los Angeles Times, researchers from the College of William & Mary; University of California, Davis; and University of South Florida have shown that their studies of oyster shells found in the well debris in the original James Fort add to the understanding that the worst drought in 800 years exacerbated the inadequate planning and provisioning of the Virginia Company.

The recent excavation of the well, which became a trash pit, provided strong evidence of the drought from shells that the settlers had insufficient fresh drinking water and were succumbing from their use of the then-brackish supply from the James River and the well itself.

These findings are very significant in their support of the first evidence of the drought from tree rings and the reports from the colonists themselves.

See the stories at

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/59777/title/Jamestown_settlers_trash_confirms_hard_times

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-oysters-jamestown-20100605,0,5931702.story

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/05/21/1001052107.abstract?sid=a1221b78-01de-4130-990a-2477bb7a6bb2

June 26: Annual Meeting of Jamestowne Society's First California Company

2010-05-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Jamestowne Society's First California Company will be holding its annual meeting and elections on June 26, 2010 at the Crossings in Carlsbad (North San Diego County). For more details, reservation information and directions go to:

http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/june2010.php

Dr. Richard Lederer will present Fascinating Facts About Our Presidents, based on his newly updated book, Presidential Trivia: The Feats, Fates, Families, Foibles, and Firsts of Our American Presidents.

Dr. Lederer is an author, speaker, and teacher best known for his books on word play and the English language and his use of oxymorons. His column, Looking at Language, is syndicated in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.

In 1998, he was a founding co-host of the weekly radio show, A Way with Words, broadcast by KPBS, San Diego Public Radio, and heard worldwide. He retired from the program in October 2006.

He received a Master of Arts in Teaching at Harvard University and taught English and media at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire for 27 years He earned a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire.

He has written more than 30 books, and is the father of Howard Lederer and Annie Duke, both world-renowned poker players, and Katy Lederer, an author and poet. He lives with his wife, Simone van Egeren, in San Diego, California.

As adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jamestown Settlement exhibit explores Powhatan's village

2010-05-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

From the Newport News Daily Press:

By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 247-4783

May 22, 2010

The first time Lynn Ripley reached down and coaxed a piece of broken pottery from the dirt at her newly purchased York River farm, she just trying to tidy up the grounds.

But as the years passed, the Gloucester woman turned up so many arrowheads and Native American ceramic shards that she and her husband, Bob, felt compelled to share her carefully cataloged garage of finds with archaeologists.

Nearly 15 years after her original discovery, the first public fruits of Ripley's curiosity — and the couple's sense of stewardship — can be seen in a new Jamestown Settlement exhibit.

Titled "Werowocomoco: Seat of Power," it features more than 60 artifacts from the 10,000-year history of what is now known to have been the home village of Powhatan — the powerful chief who ruled some 30 Indian tribes in coastal Virginia when the first English settlers arrived in 1607.

"Werowocomoco is an interesting project in a number of ways. For one thing, it tells you why you need to do archaeology," curator Tom Davidson says.

"It's turned up a page of Virginia's history that we never would have known about from the historical records. Werowocomoco was important before Powhatan came to power — and he came there to reinforce his authority."

Surveyed for the Department of Historic Resources in 2001 by Gloucester archaeologists David Brown and Thane Harpole, the 50-acre site held so many Native American artifacts that College of William and Mary scientists joined a comprehensive, multi-year dig in 2003.

Their most dramatic find was an extensive series of earthworks that dated to 1,300 A.D. — and which defined the highest part of the site as a ceremonial landscape.

Two parallel trench-and-bank features stretched 600 feet — dividing the rise from the rest of the property — while a smaller U-shaped earthwork enclosed an immense native structure 3 times larger than any other found in coastal Virginia.

"These were not palisades. They had no defensive function," Davidson says. "Instead, they had purely symbolic value — expressing power and authority through monumental architectural features."

Initially believed to be colonial in origin because of their size, the 4-foot wide trenches contained only Indian artifacts — and ultimately were dated to about 1,300 A.D. Their discovery marks the first evidence of such significant Native American earthworks in coastal Virginia.

"We know Powhatan was here — and that Werowocomoco functioned as the capital of his chiefdom. We know John Smith was brought here when he was captured — and that the English settlers came here on at least five different occasions to conduct trade negotiations with Powhatan," Davidson says.

"But this recognizes that there was another story behind the story."

Want to go?

What: "Werowocomoco: Seat of Power"

Where: Jamestown Settlement, off Jamestown Road and the Colonial Parkway, James City County

When: Daily through Nov. 15

Cost: $14 adults, $6.50 kids 6-12

Info: 888-593-4682/www.historyisfun.org

Learning More About Jamestowne

2010-01-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

Apropos of Karen Kupperman’s observation in San Diego (see our 1/10 post) that new lessons have been learned from the million-plus artifacts from the Jamestown Rediscovery dig, there is new word on their website that they are learning another.

The 400-year old heavily marked slate that they discovered during this year’s excavations of an early well at the center of James Fort (John Smith’s?) appears to offer an extraordinary opportunity for the Rediscovery team to collaborate with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute, the Folger Shakespeare Library and interested historians to analyze, read and interpret markings that may have important historical implications for Jamestowne.

There is no telling what picture of life in the days of the earliest settlers that this contemporary written artifact may tell us; it may have a profound effect on what we have believed. It could well add the growing realization that much of the pre-colonial settlement’s documentary history we have been given is tainted.

Read more about this at the January 6 posting by clicking on the headline above, or go to:

http://www.historicjamestowne.org/news/2010_dig_conclusion.php

Historic Jamestowne Dig Season Ends as High-Tech Imagery and Handwriting Analysis Continue to Decipher 400-Year-Old Mystery

First California Company Enjoys an Outstanding Jamestowne Program in San Diego

2010-01-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company presented a world-class program at its annual meeting yesterday (January 9) in San Diego with speakers Society Governor Carter Branham Snow Furr, Esq., and renowned scholar Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman of New York University (and author of The Jamestowne Project).

Before an estimated audience of sixty (including members of DeAnza Chapter of NSDAR), Governor Furr (who, with his wife, enjoyed a respite from the wintry rigors in Norfolk, VA) reported on the state of the Society.

He observed that there are now 36 Society Companies and 200 new members were enrolled last year. He commented on the excellent presentation at the Society’s recent November meeting in Richmond on the archeological dig at Werowomoco (near Jamestowne on the York River). This was the site of the largest village and seat of the Powhatan chiefdom when the first settlers arrived. He suggested visiting the Society’s web site at http://www.jamestowne.org to see the Power Point slides. They include evidence of the residence of the Powhatan’s supreme Chief, where, among other things, John Smith was held after his capture in late 1607 and Admiral Christopher Newport made first official contact with the Chief.

He briefly discussed the various funds that the Society employs to, among other purposes, provide fellowships for graduate students (one of which helped with support for the Werowomoco dig), maintain the headquarters, and support Preservation Virginia (formerly the APVA).

He announced that the Society’s spring 2010 meeting will be held at the Williamsburg Lodge on May 15, with a presentation by Allain Outlaw, who has been working on the excavation of Argalltown, purported to be “Jamestowne’s first suburb” (NOTE: See our posting of Saturday, September 19, 2009: “New Archeological Discoveries Near Jamestowne”). The annual Company Governors’ Roundtable will again be held the preceding day, May 14 (more details at the Society’s website).

Dr. Kupperman gave a compelling, entertaining and informative review of how and why the English undertook New World colonization efforts, the goals, structure and financing of the settling and development of Jamestowne, and new lessons being learned from the million-plus artifacts from the Jamestown Rediscovery digs that belie much of the settlement’s documented history that we now realize has been tainted.

She detailed how the management and governance policies of the Virginia Company changed over Jamestowne’s first decade of existence, and the evolution from a marginally staffed and militarily structured trading post into England’s first planted colony that would generate its profit from production of tobacco – the world’s first mass-marketed consumer product. She further elaborated on the first use of incentives such as land grants (known as “headrights”) to foster emigration and adventure from an over-populated and financially depressed England. She emphasized how the Virginia Company further changed its policy to encourage the emigration of young, well-qualified women to help maintain the colonial quality of life, permanence and stability. The leadership of the Company finally directed the colony to govern its local affairs (especially taxation) by electing a General Assembly; the first of its kind in America.

She concluded by relating how Jamestowne, unlike being the failure as it is often portrayed, became the model for all subsequent English colonial ventures (beginning with the Mayflower’s landing in Massachusetts), largely based on John Smith’s writings (as perceptive an observer as he was an intrepid explorer). These models were then employed worldwide as the foundation for the British Empire.

First California Governor Joanne Howell Murphy chaired the meeting, and the program was arranged and presented by Lieutenant Governor Ginny Gottlieb. The meeting was held at the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club in Rancho Santa Fe, California. For more information about First California Company, please go to http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/index.php

If You’re Planning to Attend the January 9th Meeting of the Jamestowne Society’s First California Company,…

2009-12-18T22:29:00.000-08:00

… you’re in for a real treat. You’ll be hearing from (in my opinion) the world’s most informed early American colonial and Jamestown scholar, Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman.

Her 2007 book, The Jamestown Project, is the most illuminating and comprehensive chronicle of the first seventeen years of the first permanent English colony in America; probably the best of the spate of early Jamestown accounts that came out of its Quatercentenary. She cogently and compellingly presents the many factors and reasons for England’s determination to set it as a foothold for its New World presence. She tells you how it became the model for all English colonial efforts that commenced with the 1620 landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the foundation for the legendary British Empire that came about in the following century and a half.

She relates the many archeological and archival findings of the past decade that dismiss with authority the myths of the so-called failure of Jamestown. She goes on to catalog the valiant efforts and determination of its settlers in the face of the mismanagement, overwrought optimism and unrealistic expectations of its aristocratic backers, who failed the many common person “adventurers” who, as either small investors or Ancient Planters who ventured their lives and persons, received little to no support in furthering the dangerous and exasperating venture.

Two major features of The Jamestown Project are the underlying threads of the intercultural clashes of Native Americans with the first wave of what became one of history’s major mass human migrations, and the context for those clashes in the extraordinary environmental stresses of the worst droughts in seven centuries of North American history and the Little Ice Age, when the James River froze over (as did the Thames in London). Both contributed the inability of the settlers and natives alike to provide themselves with adequate food supplies.

Finally, she relates John Smith’s role in shaping not only Jamestown’s survival for the short time he was there, but prescribing the formula for the success of all future British colonies that began with New England (the name that he “…coined…[as] one of the great propaganda strokes of American history.”)

While the order period to get copies of The Jamestown Project at the event has expired, there are a few days to make reservations for this once-in-a-lifetime program (First California Company is accepting reservations until 12/29); go to http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/jan2010.php

Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman will present at Jamestowne Society’s First California Company Annual Meeting and Luncheon on January 9

2009-12-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

For its annual meeting on Saturday, January 9, the First California Company of the Jamestowne Society will feature one of the most esteemed scholars on Jamestown and early English settlement in North America, Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, the Silver Professor of History, New York University. She will be joined by honored guest, the Governor of the Jamestowne Society, Carter Branham Snow Furr, Esq., of Norfolk, Virginia.

The meeting and luncheon will be held at Fairbanks Ranch Country Club, 15150 San Dieguito Road, Rancho Santa Fe, CA. Reservations are requested by December 15, and more information can be found at http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/jan2010.php

According to First California Company’s website, “Several First California Company members heard her speak at the Huntington Library’s conference honoring Jamestown’s 400th anniversary. They agreed that she was a very stimulating, accessible speaker who left her audience with new information and a broader perspective. One said she is the best ever heard on Jamestown. Dr. Kupperman has won many prestigious fellowships, memberships, and awards, including the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History in 2000 and the AHA’s award for the best book in American history in 1995.”

From her NYU web page, we see that her research interests include the early modern Atlantic world; colonization; Native American history.

It goes on to say, “Karen Ordahl Kupperman's scholarship focuses on the Atlantic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly contacts and ventures between Europe and North America and the Caribbean. One part of her work deals with the ways English promoters and settlers wrote about the American Indians, and the ways that both Indians and English tried to interpret the other and to incorporate unprecedented opportunities and challenges. All parties to new relationships tried to fit the others into their own understanding of human nature and society, and to manipulate unprecedented situations in terms of that understanding.

“Another major theme in her work is the difficulties colonial leaders faced in trying to create orderly, functioning societies in America. Colonial founders discovered that none of their assumptions about how to create societies was realistic in the absence of the kinds of sanctions that shaped behavior in Europe. These difficulties forced them to think deeply about how society actually works, and about what might be distinctive about English society. Innovative solutions emerged and distinctive forms were created as a result.

“A third thread of her research deals with the American environment and its impact on early European migrants. The climate in America was far different from their expectations and this posed intellectual and physical problems. For one thing, America's east coast was much colder than comparable latitudes in western Europe's maritime climate and reporters therefore had to explain why New York, for example, is so cold despite being so far south of London. This problem was exacerbated by the severe Little Ice Age conditions that prevailed in the colonial period, and these conditions transformed life for Indians as well as newcomers. Early theories about the human relationship to the environment began to emerge.

“Kupperman's present research is an attempt to reconstruct the climate of the Little Ice Age in America and to analyze Europeans' attempts to make sense of the climatic phenomena they encountered, especially as they competed with Indian leaders for control of the natural world.”

Her recent books include the following:
The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA, 2007)
Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD, 2007)
Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000)
Consulting Editor, CD-ROM of Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574-1739 (Routledge, 2000)
Major Problems in American Colonial History, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2000, 1st ed. 1992)
America in European Consciousness (Chapel Hill, 1995)
Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993)
Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings (Chapel Hill, 1988)

For answers to questions and other information, contact the First California Company at
http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/contact.php

Jamestown Rediscovery Fall Update

2009-10-14T21:56:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t kept up with them, Jamestown Rediscovery has published its Fall update on the James Fort Dig. Go to

http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/

According to the web site, “Digging deeper and deeper into a well near the center of James Fort, the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological team continues to find hundreds of artifacts each day as their excavations give shape to what was probably the fort's first well, built under the direction of Captain John Smith in early 1609.”

There have been some dramatic discoveries earlier this summer. Professor Seth Mallios, former Jamestown Rediscovery archeologist and now chair of San Diego State University’s Anthropology Department, says that he “was just out there on the island …on July 4th. The dig is still producing amazing stuff.”

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company

2009-10-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

There is nascent interest in Jamestowne in Southern California.

The Jamestowne Society’s First California Company is celebrating its tenth anniversary. It was organized in 1999 and has offered two to three programs each year on Jamestowne and related topics. They have included: Exchange and Violence at Jamestown: Recent Archaeological Insights from the 1607 James Fort Site, by Dr. Seth M. Mallios, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, at San Diego State University; A New World - England's First View of America, by Dr. Peter Mancall, Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Southern California and the Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; Native Americans that the Jamestowne Settlers Met in 1607; and, Pride, Prejudice, and the Politics of History.

First California Company is one of 36 Companies of the Jamestowne Society (see the link at the bottom of this page). It is composed of members of the Society who are interested in associating with other members in California and participating in events and other activities that it sponsors. Its meetings have alternated between the Los Angeles and San Diego areas.

For more information about First California Company and its programs, go to http://www.jamestownecalifornia.org/. For specific queries, go to the “Contact Us” tab at the web site.

Hobson Woodward Lectures On His Book, "Brave Vessel"

2009-10-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Our post of August 21, 2009 recommended Hobson Woodward’s book on the shipwreck of the Sea Venture, the saving of Jamestown after the Starving Times, and how Shakespeare used William Strachey's account of the shipwreck in writing the Tempest.

Woodward delivered a 55-minute lecture on the book on Cpan2 Books on 9/27 and 28. In case you missed it, you can view it from CSpan2’s archives at

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/288623-1

That archival site also allows you read the transcript of his talk.

Fort Algernoune, 1609: Colonial Virginia's Maritime Rim

2009-09-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

From October 16 to 18, a celebration and conference commemorating the 400th anniversary of Anglo-America's first coastal fortification -- "Fort Algernoune, 1609: Colonial Virginia's Maritime Rim" -- will take place at Old Point Comfort, the national historic landmark site of present-day Fort Monroe.

"Algernoune Fort" was constructed at what's now called Old Point Comfort to guard approaches to Jamestown colony and the Chesapeake Bay.

The October event is said to be planned "to consider how the maritime rim of colonial Virginia developed an egalitarian and culturally diverse society different from its Jamestown neighbor."

Participants include James Whittenburg, William R. Pullen Chair, Department of History, College of William & Mary; William M. Kelso, Director of Archaeology, Historic Jamestowne Rediscovery Archaeological Project, Preservation Virginia; Ivor Noël Hume, OBE , Research Associate (hon.) Smithsonian Institution; Camilla Townsend, Professor of History, Rutgers University; David Harris Sacks, Richard F. Scholz Professor of History, Reed College; James Horn, Vice President of Research and Historical Interpretation, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History, New York University.

CONFERENCE OVERVIEW:
The Fort Algernoune, 1609 celebration and conference commemorates the 400th anniversary of Anglo-America’s first coastal fortification. It honors the US Army’s outstanding military legacy, embodied in Fort Monroe, and recognizes the enduring significance of Old Point Comfort’s strategic location in defending American freedom. The celebrations will begin on Friday,October 16, 2009, with an Army Retreat Ceremony on Fort Monroe’s parade ground, home to the ancient Algernoune Live Oak. The event will include a US Citizen Naturalization ceremony.

Immediately thereafter, the Casemate Museum will host a reception to open a new historical exhibit on Fort Algernoune.

On Saturday,October 17, the symposium will consider how the maritime rim of colonial Virginia developed. Fort Algernoune introduced English maritime law to the New World, imposed the nascent customs system, regulated commerce, and enforced allegiance to the British crown.

Most importantly, it created a visible symbol of England’s bid for sovereignty over vast stretches of the Atlantic shoreline.On Sunday,October 18, conference attendees have several options,which include an elegant Sunday brunch at the restored 1928 Chamberlin dining room overlooking the entrance to the Hampton Roads Harbor, or one of two tours: a boat excursion to Fort Wool or a land tour of Fort Boykin and other historic sites along the James River.

FEES:
$50, includes lunch.Optional tours, $25 per person

FOR REGISTRATION INFORMATION:
www.fmfada.com• Joan Baker, jbaker@fmfada.com
Phone: 757-637-7778
151 Bernard Road • FortMonroe,VA 23651

For more information, please see the links on the left side of the home page at the Web site of the Fort Monroe Authority (officially, that's the "Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority"), http://www.fmfada.com/.

New Archeological Discoveries Near Jamestowne

2009-09-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

According to an article by Rusty Carter in the Virginia Gazette on September 16, Alain Outlaw of Williamsburg-based Archaeological & Cultural Solutions has uncovered another settlement or village near Jamestowne for which he has been searching since 1975.

“It’s been a slow process,” said Outlaw, who is also an adjunct professor at Christopher Newport University. For two years, since he got access to the land, his students and volunteers have researched the site.

Carter goes on to report, “The village was started in 1617 by Capt. Samuel Argall, then a colorful lieutenant governor of the colony. It thrived for three years, but his impetuous behavior led many of the settlers to move away to Martin’s Hundred near Carter’s Grove Plantation”.

For the complete article, go to

http://www.vagazette.com/articles/2009/09/16/news/doc4ab0384a03385778594361.txt

This Day in Jamestowne's History: John Smith Becomes President

2009-09-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

From This Day in History (History.com): September 10, 1608
Smith to lead Jamestown

English adventurer John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia--the first permanent English settlement in North America. Smith, a colorful figure, had won popularity in the colony because of his organizational abilities and effectiveness in dealing with local Native American groups.

In May 1607, about 100 English colonists settled along the James River in Virginia to found Jamestown. The settlers fared badly because of famine, disease, and Indian attacks, but were aided by the 27-year-old John Smith, who directed survival efforts and mapped the area. While exploring the Chickahominy River in December 1607, Smith and two colonists were captured by Powhatan warriors. At the time, the Powhatan Indian confederacy consisted of around 30 Tidewater-area tribes led by Chief Wahunsonacock, known as Chief Powhatan to the English. Smith's companions were killed, but he was spared and released (according to a 1624 account by Smith) because of the dramatic intercession of Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan's 13-year-old daughter.

In 1608, Smith became president of the Jamestown colony, but the settlement continued to suffer. An accidental fire destroyed much of the town, and hunger, disease, and Indian attacks continued. During this time, Pocahontas often came to Jamestown as an emissary of her father, sometimes bearing gifts of food to help the hard-pressed settlers. She befriended the settlers and became acquainted with English ways. In 1609, Smith was injured from a fire in his gunpowder bag and was forced to return to England.

John Smith returned to the New World in 1614 to explore the New England coast, carefully mapping the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. That April, Pocahontas married the English planter John Rolfe in Jamestown. On another voyage of exploration, in 1615, Smith was captured by pirates but escaped after three months of captivity. He then returned to England, where he died in 1631.

Recommended New Book: "Brave Vessel: The Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest"

2009-08-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

Hobson Woodward’s very readable new book, Brave Vessel: The Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, tells three stories: the shipwreck of the Sea Venture (for another account, see our post of May 27), the saving of Jamestown after the Starving Times, and how Shakespeare used the first one in writing the Tempest.

While its subtitle mentions only the castaways, Woodward focuses on William Strachey, a Shakespeare contemporary and would-be poet whose real forte was as an acute observer and chronicler of the shipwreck and Jamestown’s early years. Where his poetry and other works would otherwise relegate him to the oblivion of forgotten mediocrity, he stands out as an extraordinary and original source for those events.

For those of us interested in the Jamestown saga, Strachey is known as the scribe who, after surviving the shipwreck and coming upon the remnants of Jamestown’s Starving Times, narrated the primary accounts of the efforts of Sir Thomas Gates and Thomas West, Lord de la Warre (a/k/a Delaware by Woodward) to save, resuscitate and restore the failed and abandoned settlement. As the nascent colony’s secretary, he provided us with the details of Thomas Dale’s governance by strict civil and military regulations that brought order to a dysfunctional embryonic society.

Woodward peoples his stories with some of the lesser-known personages in Jamestown’s early history, such as the two Powhatans who were returning from England on the Sea Venture, and settler William Pierce, whose wife and daughter were on a separate ship in the Sea Venture’s fleet and went on to the Starving Times.

He describes his extensive and scholarly research for this book thus: “My foray into Virginia and Tempest history took me across the Atlantic, where I visited the libraries of London and Oxford and stood on the Thames riverbank where Strachey’s ship departed for Jamestown. I saw Shakespeare’s work on the stage of the rebuilt Globe Theater and wandered the sites of his London haunts. In Bermuda, I searched for beach glass in the cove where the castaways launched one of their homemade ships and visited museums and archives to examine artifacts from 1609. Back in America, I went to the Historic Jamestown Archaearium museum to see artifacts of the settlement and the bones of Bermuda birds eaten by the colonists. Nearby, I saw Shakespeare’s characters come alive again within the walls of Virginia’s replica Blackfriars Playhouse.”

The odyssey of the Sea Venture’s complement and passengers usually receives a mere mention in Jamestown histories, and rarely has been more than a remark as a Shakespeare inspiration, but here Woodward characterizes it as “…one of the great sea stories of Atlantic history.” And, as he says in his Preface, “The use of William Strachey’s narrative of the wreck of the Sea Venture as the framework of The Tempest is a prime example of Shakespeare’s craft…My goal is to present for the first time the complete story of Strachey’s remarkable account and Shakespeare’s transformation of that narrative into his magical Tempest.” This he has done in a well-paced, page-turning style.

It would serve one well to re-read The Tempest along with this fine book.

Brave Vessel: The Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, by Hobson Woodward. Published by Viking, $25.95 (288p; actually 199 p, plus acknowledgments, notes, a bibliography and an index) ISBN 978-0-670-02096-6

For an interview with the author, go to

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/07/26/historian_strachey_delights_in_his_research_work_for_brave_vessel/

For more reviews, go to

Shakespeare’s Storm, by Jonathan Yardley in the 7/19/2009 Washington Post at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071701098.html

And

“A Brave Vessel” by Hobson Woodward floats The Tempest on research and imagination, by Daniel Dyer in the 8/10/2009 Cleveland Plain Dealer at

http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2009/08/a_brave_vessel_by_hobson_woodw.html

PBS Rebroadcasts Special on Jamestown's Founding

2009-08-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

PBS rebroadcast a 2007 Time Team Special on Jamestowne’s founding and early years last night (August 19). This was produced by Britain’s Channel 4 and first shown in May 2007, but still is worth viewing for those who haven’t seen it. It is being rebroadcast in coming days at late hours.

Jamestown - America's Birthplace - centers around the archaeological dig, APVA’s Jamestown Rediscovery, and offers some great shots of an excited Bill Kelso showing joy at recovered artifacts being brought out from the early excavation of a well (go to our post of August 4 – New Findings at Historic Jamestown – for a link that will keep you current on what’s going on there).

The other feature of the program is its British perspective on Jamestown’s founding, and genealogical links with several of the earliest settlers, particularly carpenters who were the designers and builders of it earliest houses.

For more information on the program, go to http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/2007_james.html

More Artifacts from the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island

2009-08-05T09:29:00.001-07:00

Work is continuing to turn up artifacts at Roanoke Island, the site of the lost colony that preceded Jamestown. PBS's Time Team recently reported on last year’s dig under the direction of Nick Luccketti, which you can see at

http://video.pbs.org/video/1098873031/search/Roanoke%20Isand

According to the Outerbanks Sentinel's article, "Necklace Inspires More Digs", they’re turning up new evidence of the lost colonists. See the link http://obsentinel.womacknewspapers.com/articles/2009/08/05/features/feats156.txt

New Findings at Historic Jamestowne

2009-08-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Bill Kelso and his team of Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists have been making many more findings of artifacts and graves in the confines of the original James Fort (see our post of June 9, for one of the more significant finds).

It's possible for readers to keep up with what they're doing with the periodic series of videos on their web site covering what's going on this summer (http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/).

These videos offer graphic descriptions and comments on their findings and deserve to revisited during these months of high activity.

Another Anniversary: 390th

2009-07-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

From History.com for 6/30/2009

July 30, 1619

First legislative assembly in America

In Jamestown, Virginia, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World--the House of Burgesses--convenes in the choir of the town's church.

Earlier that year, the London Company, which had established the Jamestown settlement 12 years before, directed Virginia Governor Sir George Yeardley to summon a "General Assembly" elected by the settlers, with every free adult male voting. Twenty-two representatives from the 11 Jamestown boroughs were chosen, and Master John Pory was appointed the assembly's speaker. On July 30, the House of Burgesses (an English word for "citizens") convened for the first time. Its first law, which, like all of its laws, would have to be approved by the London Company, required tobacco to be sold for at least three shillings per pound. Other laws passed during its first six-day session included prohibitions against gambling, drunkenness, and idleness, and a measure that made Sabbath observance mandatory.

The creation of the House of Burgesses, along with other progressive measures, made Sir George Yeardley exceptionally popular among the colonists, and he served two terms as Virginia governor.

Another 400th Anniverary

2009-07-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

Today, July 28, marks the 400th anniversary of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture on the rocks at Bermuda, and being ceremonially marked as its Quatercentenary. The full story of this event and what it meant for Jamestown was told in the book we featured in our May 27 post, (see below).

Jamestowne Rediscovery: More Evidence of How Life Was Lived

2009-06-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

It’s not often that the press gives any coverage to Jamestown, but the announcement of the finding of a slate believed to be from its earliest years got their attention. According to Zinie Chen Simpson of the Associated Press, Jamestowne Rediscovery archaeologists have pulled a 400-year-old slate tablet from what they think was John Smith’s original well.

The slate is covered with faint inscriptions of local birds, flowers, a tree and caricatures of men, along with letters and numbers. It was found May 11 at the center of James Fort, which was established in 1607. Research director William Kelso said the inscriptions were made with a slate pencil on the 4-inch-by-8-inch slate. The writings were wiped off, but they left grooves on the surface, he said. "There were things written over things, written over things”.

Researchers at NASA Langley put the slate through three-dimensional digital analysis so they could decipher its pictures and text. The imaging system normally is used to inspect materials for aerospace use. An eagle and a heron appeared on the slate, along with three types of plants, which haven't yet been identified. A depiction of lions — the British armorial sign in the early 1600s — indicates that the writer could have been a government official, Kelso said.

The artifact shows the high level of interest the English settlers had in the New World's flora and fauna, Kelso said. The archaeology team thinks that someone probably started the artwork and writing in England, and added to the slate over time after arriving in the new colony of Virginia.

Archaeologists dated the slate based on the site's history and the discovery of coins dated 1601-02 among the items. Colonists used the well as a trash pit after the water became fouled, Kelso said, and records show it was covered up in 1611 until archaeologists began to find 17th-century objects at the site last fall.

Jamestowne Rediscovery tells us that its important project is giving us more evidence of how early settlers lived, and may produce a better picture of what went on during the “starving time” of the winter of 1609-10. Go to the link (at the very bottom of this blog) to the Historic Jamestown site and read the full account of what this slate is and what it may mean.

Jamestown reading: “The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown” and “Brave Vessel: The Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown…”

2009-05-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Bermuda’s Quatercentenary (see our post of January 5) is a reminder of its vital place in Jamestown’s and America’s history. While John Smith was in his second year of bringing discipline to and survival skills to the nascent colony and recording his Chesapeake explorations with detail and accuracy that can be used today, a nine-ship fleet headed by the 300-ton Sea Venture sailed for the New World as “the largest England had ever sent across the Atlantic” with relief for the struggling outpost and to bring new orders for its governance.

The details of the fate of the Sea Venture, and the new leadership of Jamestown it carried amongst its 150 passengers, in a hurricane as they neared Virginia is a compelling tale told by historians Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith in their acclaimed book, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008).

As most histories of the colony usually summarize, the Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda’s reefs, enabling the miraculous survival of its company. The story of their yearlong adventure and eventual passage to Jamestown to discover the abysmal remainder of the Starving Times of the winter of 1609-10 has become the stuff of legend.

Here is Chuck Leddy’s review from the Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 2008 edition:

“Four hundred years ago, as European powers competed for dominance in the New World, England looked like the nation least likely to succeed. Spain had spent the 16th century extracting shiploads of gold from modern-day Mexico and Peru. Nations as small as the Netherlands and Portugal had a far stronger presence in the New World than did England.

'As late as 1600,' write history professors Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith, 'the English had still established no colonies in the Americas. In fact, they had failed in every Atlantic enterprise they had tried.'

“The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown, Glover and Smith’s well-researched account of England’s rocky early beginnings in America, effectively pieces together a largely untold and essential story about how close the British came to failure in the New World. In the end, Glover and Smith argue, it was the fate of a seemingly lost ship that finally turned the tide.

“Glover and Smith begin with an account of England’s early disasters in the New World. Their Roanoke Island settlement was a particularly horrific example: The entire colony mysteriously disappeared, likely slaughtered by local Indians.

“Yet it was precisely such catastrophes that prevented Spain from viewing England as a serious rival in America. Although Spain had vast property rights in the New World granted by the Roman Catholic Church, England’s abysmal history of transatlantic failures caused the powerful Spanish to leave the English colonies alone rather than to attack or try to expel them.

“The authors, both history professors, argue convincingly that Spain could have easily attacked the English settlement at Jamestown after it was established in 1607: 'That Spain neither demanded an end to the Virginia Company … [nor] destroyed the settlement once it was founded arguably turned out to be the greatest gift England could have received.

'Yet Jamestown nearly failed on its own anyway, due to bloody internal dissension, starvation, and relentless Indian attack, creating a public relations disaster for Jamestown and the London-based Virginia Company that funded it. Attracting new settlers to ship out to Virginia and finding investors back in England would depend upon the colony’s perceived success.

'The Virginia Company tried its hardest to squelch the plentiful bad news coming from Jamestown, most of it concerning widespread malnutrition and incompetent leadership. Jamestown’s colonial council censored all the settlers’ letters, removing anything that might “discourage others."'

“In 1609 the Virginia Company launched a brilliant public relations campaign in England, tying the fate of the Virginia colony to England’s national destiny and God’s blessings upon the Protestant faith. They also sent a fleet of seven ships led by the Sea Venture to resupply and strengthen Jamestown.

“But instead of bolstering the struggling colony, the boats had a turbulent transatlantic crossing (vividly described in the book), culminating with the Sea Venture sailing straight into a hurricane off Bermuda.

“In Jamestown and England it was commonly assumed that the Sea Venture had been destroyed – a piece of news that was devastating to the Virginia Company’s fortunes. At that point, 'nothing could stop the spreading belief that things had gone horribly wrong in America.' Meanwhile, the Jamestown colony was suffering through 'the starving time' during the winter of 1609-10, a period of hunger and disease that killed more than 80 percent of the settlers.

“Yet the missing Sea Venture had not sunk. The ship had run aground off Bermuda. The castaways – delighted by the island – survived there for 10 months, nearly mutinying when they were finally ordered to sail on to Jamestown.

“When the[y) …, led by Thomas Gates, finally did reach Jamestown, they found a decimated colony. The remaining settlers convinced Gates to abandon Jamestown and return to England. But as Gates was sailing up the James River, another fleet from the Virginia Company arrived and Gates decided to turn back and try again, saving both the Jamestown colony and England’s fortunes in the New World.

“The narrative of Glover and Smith can be somewhat academic at times, as when the authors engage in a textual analysis of Shakespeare’s 'The Tempest' (the plot of which may have been inspired by the tale of the Sea Venture).

“That quibble aside, however, this book paints a vivid portrait of lives packed with daily hardships, from dangerous transatlantic crossings to the realistic fear of being massacred by Indians.

“Yet the perseverance of the Sea Venture would ultimately pay off in England’s future dominance of North America.”

Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer and member of the National Book Critics Circle.

ALSO NOTEWORTHY: Watch for a new book, Brave Vessel: The Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, by Hobson Woodward. Scheduled for release on July 13, and published by Viking, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-670-02096-6

According to The Publishers Weekly for 5/25/2009: “In this well-written and expertly paced work of popular scholarship, Woodward, an associate editor of the Adams papers, tells the story of William Strachey, an aspiring poet whose chronicle of a disastrous sea voyage and its aftermath had a profound influence on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Strachey is a fine figure for historical resurrection—he was good friends with John Donne and a passenger on pioneering journeys to the New World, which eventually brought him, aboard the Sea Venture, to Bermuda and the infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. Woodward draws heavily on Strachey's written narrative, often to marvelous effect. This is particularly true of the dramatic storm scenes, in which the entire crew of the Sea Venture nearly perished. Through Strachey, Woodward tells of the conflicts that divided the crew after making landfall in Bermuda and the hardships of replenishing a starving Jamestown's supplies. The heart of the book is Woodward's recreation of Strachey's viewing of The Tempest, which affords the author the opportunity to catalogue the narrative and linguistic parallels between the Sea Venture's travails and the play—fascinating fodder for the committed Shakespearean source hunter. Maps."

When J.P. Morgan Came to Town

2009-04-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

During the Wall Street Panic of 1907, the one man who could fix things — the most powerful man in America — was ensconced in a house on East Grace street.

by Edwin Slipek Jr.

In a span of a few weeks Richmond’s daily headlines had grown increasingly ominous: “Precipitate Declines in Prices on the Stock Market,” “Gloomy Day on Wall Street” and “Bank Closes Doors.”

However unsettlingly familiar, these aren’t contemporary pronouncements of tumbling stock prices, foreclosures, bank failures or financial villainy. They’re headlines from a century ago foretelling what became known as the Panic of 1907.

Today, a cluster of federal entities — Congress, the Treasury Department, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve — fumble to formulate a rubric to stem the economic freefall. But a century ago, none of these entities, if they even existed, possessed much clout during a financial crisis. Times were simple. There was one Mr. Fix-it — autocratic, aristocratic and munificent J. Pierpont Morgan.

But when the Panic of 1907 erupted he was missing in action. During three critical weeks, most evenings Morgan was enjoying an expensive cigar on a private porch in downtown Richmond.

By 1907 the American economy was marked by fast-changing factors that strained and afflicted the financial system. Beginning in the late 1860s, after the Civil War, the United States moved dramatically more swiftly from an agrarian to an industrial economy. By 1900 less than 40 percent of Americans were involved in farming, while 40 percent of families lived in urban areas. By the turn of the 20th century, the United States produced about a third of the world’s coal, iron and steel.

If the United States was the world’s industrial juggernaut, its preening businessmen were its sex symbols. Men such as Ford, Flagler, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, McCormick, Mellon, Guggenheim and Frick were household names. Their actions affected the livelihoods of almost the entire population through corporate tentacles that clutched the steel, automobile, oil, mining, farm equipment and public transit industries — sometimes in unlikely combinations.

These titans neither paid personal income taxes nor faced significant government regulation. A national banking system was nonexistent and there were few checks and balances on corporate activity. But despite their competitiveness, these titans shared some common characteristics: They built their wealth on the backs of working people; they relied on railroads for raw materials and the delivery of finished products; and they needed a flow of financial backing.

For the latter they inevitably turned to Wall Street, where New York investment banks acted on behalf of individuals and corporations that possessed billions of dollars for investment. Often, however, instead of waiting for such investment opportunities, these bankers created them, establishing railroad, mining, gas and streetcar or subway operations in new configurations and often with the intent of destroying the competition.

The investment banker who reined supreme was J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), the head of J. P. Morgan and Co. He was an intelligent, educated, cultured and confident man — and a devout Episcopalian. By 1907 he’d become the most powerful man in America. He believed in consolidating competing forces and operations within any given industry. And while Morgan was statesmanlike, he kept a wary eye on the freewheeling ways of his colleagues, who were often his competitors and customers.

Key to establishing his empire was that he seldom invested in anything in which he didn’t have a voice or vote. Among the railroads he controlled were the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the New York Central, the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Erie, and the Northern Pacific. He created General Electric, AT&T and International Harvester corporations. The crowning achievement of his corporate alchemy was establishing the world’s first $1 billion corporation, United States Steel Corp.

While his power and influence grew in the last decades of the 19th century, Morgan virtually controlled Wall Street. In 1895 President Grover Cleveland sought and received an emergency loan from him of $65 million in gold to avert a national financial crisis.

But the period that followed the 1890s depression was a boom time economically, and in 1907 Morgan, then 70, enjoyed what began as a fulfilling year. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White redesigned his home on New York’s Madison Avenue and 36th Street, now the Morgan Library and Museum, to accommodate his internationally celebrated and growing collection of books and medieval and Renaissance art. Morgan was also generous: In 1907 he purchased a major coin collection for the Metropolitan Museum, which he’d help establish, and built a wing at Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum in memory of his father, Junius S. Morgan, an American-born London financier, who’d paved the way for his son’s successes.

Later, during a summer of 1907 European trip, Morgan was received by King Victor Emmanuel III in Rome and greeted warmly by Pope Pius X as if he were an old friend. Morgan invited King Edward VII to his London town house and, over iced coffee (Morgan was not adverse to spirits, but drank moderately), to show the monarch his art collection. At one point Edward asked, “The ceiling is too low for that work, why do you hang it there?” Pausing for a moment, Morgan replied: “Because I like it there, sir.”

But returning to New York in early autumn, Morgan eagerly anticipated what he believed would be the highlight of his year, an October visit to Richmond for the triennial meeting of the Episcopal Church as a lay representative of New York. He’d enjoyed these conventions immensely over the years.

In the fall of 1907, however, storm clouds had gathered over Wall Street. His colleagues urged him to stay in New York.

For months the stock market had tottered. But the spark that ignited the panic was set by an unscrupulous engineer, Frederick A. Heinze, who had amassed considerable wealth from copper mining. He’d purchased control of a bank to use its assets to back continued stock speculations. When his investments failed, his bank collapsed after depositors made a run on its holdings. This closure triggered runs on other banks and the financial crisis became full-blown. When New York’s second largest bank, Knickerbocker Trust, ran out of cash and other banks refused to shore it up, it closed. In October 1907 the streets of New York’s financial district were flooded with frantic and angry customers and investors withdrawing their holdings.

Who to call? President Theodore Roosevelt was in the wilds of Louisiana at the time hunting black bears — but could have done little anyway. The secretary of the Treasury rushed to New York but there was no central national bank and no Federal Reserve system in place at that time to offer stability.

The one man with the clout, intelligence, resources and moxie to restore order was J. Pierpont Morgan.

So where was he while banking was under siege? Morgan had arrived in Richmond Oct. 1, becoming comfortably ensconced for three weeks at the Episcopal convention. America’s most powerful man didn’t intend to interrupt his church work. As much as he loved lording over Wall Street or collecting rare books and old-master art, he was above all else an ecclesiastical groupie. He couldn’t get his fill of the Episcopal Church, whether sitting alone in a darkened corner of his own understated, St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York listening to an organist practice, or debating with high-ranking clergy an arcane point of church governance.

Autumn of 1907 was high season in Virginia. The year marked not only the 300th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, but also the tercentenary of the Episcopal church, which established Christianity in the English-speaking New World. In October, while the eyes of the world were on the World’s Fair in Norfolk, Richmond was host to one of the largest and most prestigious gatherings in its history. One hundred Episcopalian bishops from around the world were among some 1,000 delegates at the three-week conference.

“Prelates Arrive for Convention … Bishop of London and J. P. Morgan at Cynosure,” a News Leader headline announced in the Oct. 1 afternoon edition. The newspaper would cover the proceedings breathlessly until adjournment.

En route to Richmond many clergy and delegates stopped briefly in Washington for the cornerstone-laying of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the National Cathedral. A special nine-car train slowly proceeded southward, allowing passengers to view such attractions as the Episcopal seminary in Alexandria and, down the tracks, the house where Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson died. A lively Confederate veteran entertained the captive audience of Northerners with vividly nostalgic stories of the Lost Cause.

The train arrived at Elba Station — on West Broad at Laurel near the site of a current Virginia Commonwealth University dormitory — in early afternoon. A crowd of some 1,000 people welcomed the train, straining to catch a glimpse of the famous financier. But Morgan stayed aboard and dined with guests in a private car, he’d named Ajax, the last car of the train. His immediate party included high-profile Bishop P.H. Mayo of London, the parish of which Jamestown was once a part. According to one local account, the bishop “looks young enough to be a schoolboy, [his] face has a perpetual smile.” Evidently he was also an athlete, having once beat President Roosevelt at tennis.

Also in Morgan’s party were the bishops of Massachusetts and Albany and their wives, a lady friend from Philadelphia, Mrs. John Markoe, who some historians suggest was Morgan’s mistress, and one of Morgan’s daughters, Louisa, who served as her father’s hostess while in Richmond. Mrs. Morgan, who apparently didn’t share her husband’s keen interest in church matters, was touring in the south of France.

Awaiting Morgan at the depot were two French-made automobiles brought to Richmond to convey him and his guests during their stay. One was a 14-horsepower, red and gray Renault limousine; the other a 22-horsepower, bright red Leon Boiler, both driven by French chauffeurs.

As Morgan settled into the open Boiler, a news photographer set up his bulky apparatus. But just as he was about to snap the shutter, Morgan turned his face away from the camera. Nonplussed, the photographer lugged his equipment around the car. Again, Morgan turned away. Finally, after such torture, Morgan cooperated (he famously hated having his picture taken, probably because of a disfiguringly bulbous nose, a longtime affliction from untreated acne rosacea, an inflammatory skin condition).

The entourage made its way to 112 E. Grace St. Having deposited the luminaries, the cars returned to the station to retrieve the maids and valets plus 21 pieces of luggage.

The house Morgan had rented for his extended Richmond stay boasted excellent provenance. It belonged to Mrs. Thomas Rutherfoord, a daughter of its builder, James Thomas, a wealthy tobacconist before and during the Civil War and a generous contributor to Baptist causes (Thomas Hall at the University of Richmond is named for him).

“Imposing rather than beautiful … rather pretentious” is how Richmond architectural historian Mary Wingfield Scott later described the Italianate three story house. And though it was an impeccable address — Grace and Franklin streets were the most fashionable in town — it was a bit threadbare for Morgan. He had it brought up to his high standards prior to arrival with the main staircase and hallways laid with new wall-to-wall carpet and the installation of a modern bathroom.

To oversee the household Morgan imported one of New York’s most in-demand caterers, Louis Sherry. Although he served as concierge, planned meals and attended to a myriad of household matters, Sherry lodged at the Jefferson, just a few blocks away, not on Grace Street. Although the Jefferson had been opened in 1895, it had recently been remodeled after a major fire in 1901 destroyed significant parts of the interior.

While in Richmond, Morgan preferred the privacy of Rutherfoord place, with surroundings and hospitality he controlled rather than attending the convention’s dizzying round of social functions. He usually invited guests back from the convention to the house for lunch and dinners. The meals, however, were considerably more sedate affairs than what Sherry was capable of providing his fancy patrons at his Fifth Avenue establishment. Once in his ballroom, the caterer infamously served dinner to members of the New York Hunt Club as they sat on horseback.

After dinner, Morgan enjoyed a post mortem of the day’s convention activities followed by cards or dominoes. If no one was available, so much the better. Solitaire was his favorite game.

The banker chain-smoked from morning to bedtime and during his Richmond stay often repaired to the porch overlooking Grace Street to enjoy a cigar. Most evenings Richmonders promenaded back and forth in front of the house hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous guest but the house was set back far enough from the city sidewalk that the gawkers weren’t obnoxious even if they were obvious.

Apparently Morgan made little, if any contact with local financiers or businessmen during his stay here.

As the three-week convention wore on, however, Morgan’s days were increasingly occupied by responding to troubling telegrams from New York that kept him abreast of deteriorating financial conditions and associates imploring him to return. On occasion he sat up all night contemplating the financial situation. But he had no intention of returning to Wall Street until after the convention.

He believed that if he left the convention early, it would only set off additional alarms.

On October 1, the day Morgan and his party had created a stir at Elba Station, just a few blocks south a crowd also gathered in front of Holy Trinity Church (it would later be renamed Grace and Holy Trinity) on Laurel Street for the dedication of its expanded and handsome granite-faced sanctuary. Construction was completed just in time to provide an up-to-date and sizable venue for the convention. Other Episcopal churches that were convention sites included St. Paul’s; All Saints (at that time located on Grace Street); Monumental; St. James’s (then on Marshall Street); St. Andrews in Oregon Hill and Grace (now demolished). Additional assemblies were held at the Masonic Lodge at Broad and Adams (now the Renaissance); the City Auditorium (VCU’s Cary Street Recreation Center) and the House of Delegates chamber in the Capitol.

The Gothic revival-styled Holy Trinity Church fronted Monroe Park and was situated in the block south of the glorious Catholic cathedral that had been built through the generosity of Virginia-born robber baron Thomas Fortune Ryan and dedicated the previous Thanksgiving. Both parishes symbolized that Richmond was expanding westward, residential growth spurred in part by the city’s popular streetcar system.

On the morning of Holy Trinity’s dedication, a number of Richmonders set up camp, some with chairs, in the park to view the proceedings. During the bishops’ procession, before the sermon by Bishop George Peterkin of West Virginia, one of the colorfully robed prelates broke formation to place a $5 bill in the hand of a picturesque, one-armed Confederate veteran who had stumbled over from the Confederate veterans’ home at Boulevard and Grove to watch the proceedings.

While the convention wore on, the all-male House of Bishops and House of Deputies discussed church governance. Meanwhile, various women’s auxiliary groups met separately at various locations around town to discuss and develop social ministry and missionary programs.

Locals were dazzled by the ongoing parade of large and flamboyant hats worn by these female visitors. The headgear was considerably more fashionable than what many Richmond and Manchester women could afford, with the two cities still recovering from the war years. Prior to one evening program, at which 4,000 people had jammed into the City Auditorium, the Bishop of Brazil instructed the ladies to remove their hats to allow more space and better sight lines of the stage.

Among the issues hotly debated at the convention were the church’s stances on marriage and divorce and “the colored man’s condition and uplift,” (as one newspaper put it) and blacks’ role in the hierarchal church structure.

Among the most recognizable conference delegates was Bishop Samuel D. Ferguson, an African from Liberia. His quarters were neither the Morgan residence nor the Jefferson but the much plainer Miller’s Hotel at 139 N. Second St. (along with the Reformers Hotel on North Sixth Street, one of the city’s two listed black hotels).

Toward the end of the convention, an editorial in the News Leader chastised Bishop Henry Codman Potter of New York for dining privately with Ferguson, but rationalized: “If Bishop Potter saw fit to step a little beyond the line which we of the South regard as possible in our intercourse with colored people, it is his affair and none of ours. And the less we say about and think about it the better.”

Among the ways J. P. Morgan took an active part in the convention was his introduction of a measure seeking to limit the number of delegates at future assemblies. When debate took an acrimonious turn and the chair couldn’t restore order, Morgan instinctively took charge. He stood up and began singing a hymn at full voice, “O Zion, Haste, Thy Mission High Fulfilling.” Gradually the other delegates joined him until there was music resounding from the Capitol chamber. His bill was defeated, but he’d gracefully brought decorum to a testy situation.

Two out-of-town excursions were highlights of the convention.

About 75 delegates boarded a chartered train to Williamsburg on Oct. 5 for a special service at the recently restored Bruton Parish Church. A highlight was the dedication of a podium given by President Roosevelt and the presentation of an elegantly bound Bible sent via the Bishop of London by King Edward VII.

Of course Morgan, as the personal host of the London bishop, was included in the select Williamsburg delegation — and he was ensured of inclusion in the ceremonies. Morgan took it upon himself to become keeper of the royal Bible until it found its place near the altar.

When the special train arrived in Williamsburg, however, no one had arranged for carriages to meet the party. So amid the swarm of clergy and pooh-bahs, Morgan took charge. He commandeered a worn, pre-Civil War horse cart with a young boy at the reigns. Morgan reportedly tossed the Bible up onto the front seat, shoved his party into the rear and hoisted himself up next to the driver. They were off to the church. And yes, Morgan proudly carried the Bible in the procession.

On Oct. 12 a much larger group of 1,500 conventioneers boarded a flotilla of steamboats for a cruise to Jamestown. Richmond civic leaders Henry Lee Valentine and Jonathan Bryan, respectively, served as hosts on the boats, the Pocahontas and the Berkeley. Guests were served a picnic lunch on board that included Brunswick stew, ham sandwiches and a selection of homemade relishes. On the Pocahontas, Polk Miller and His Negro Quartet, sang “old plantation” melodies which, according to one Richmond newspaper, “were appreciated by the northern folk.”

The same paper also reported: “It was a thrilling sight, the great religious service under the capacious awning with the thousands gathered. This contrasted with the first service, which was the first act of the settlers 300 years ago, which was under a small awning of sailcloth.”

Morgan skipped the Jamestown excursion, finding it a bit too festive and far too public for his tastes.

If Virginians were giving the conventioneers a dose of old Virginia, it was probably fine with Morgan. This was the birthplace of the Episcopal church in the United States. And this faith had given him solace throughout his life.

Morgan was born in Connecticut and educated in Boston and Europe. He was brilliant at mathematics and might have become a professor. It was in London, where his father has established himself as a prominent banker, that the younger Morgan became immersed in Anglican worship services, with a special love of hymns and religious music.

Morgan worked with his father, who financed many American businesses during the heady American expansionist period of the late 1800s, and a number of other banks. Eventually he became his father’s representative in New York, seizing business opportunities, building wealth and making his own name.

In 1868 Morgan was elected to the vestry of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square, the church where he was also married. Throughout his life he was supportive of his church’s activities, especially its social ministry and its innovative programs to address training, employment and assimilation for the growing immigrant population on Manhattan’s lower East Side.

It also speaks to Morgan’s values that he never left the neighborhood where he’d first settled upon moving to New York in the 1850s. He didn’t follow the Vanderbilts, Astors or Rockefellers to more stylish neighborhoods uptown, but stayed in the old neighborhood. He preferred the company of his family. During the summer months when his wife, children and grandchildren went to the family’s Hudson River estate, he lived on the Corsair, his ocean-going yacht, docked in the East River not far from his home.

While Morgan’s art and book holdings grew, he hired Belle da Costa Greene, a librarian from Princeton University, as curator. They worked together closely and she became one of the most respected rare book and European painting authorities in the country. Remarkable for the era was that although she passed herself as Portuguese, she was the daughter of African-Americans. Was there more to her relationship with Morgan? “We tried,” she told an interviewer later in her life.

Was Morgan concerned about the state of the economy when he arrived in Richmond in October 1907? Definitely. In January he’d traveled to Washington to discuss financial regulations and changes to the banking system with federal officials. And when he’d returned to New York from his summer abroad the market had lost $1 billion in value. A similar slice of the U.S. economy today would be $421 billion.

During his three-week stay in Richmond the telegrams came in faster and their messages were longer.

The convention finally adjourned Saturday, Oct. 19. Morgan and party took a late train to New York. “Residences which had been illuminated for these three weeks of the convention were nearly all dark last night,” the News Leader reported.

The next day, Sunday, uncharacteristically he did not attend services at St. George’s but stayed home to receive a constant flow of financiers and banking officials. Lights burned around the clock for the next few days at Morgan’s New York mansion. He avoided the press that had encamped at his front door.

Occasionally he’d sneak out of the house to be driven to his offices on Wall Street, meeting with such financial wheels as Thomas Fortune Ryan, H.C. Frick and E.H. Harriman.

With additional banks on the verge of collapse, his remedy to the panic was that the largest banks would take the shares of the small banks. He basically herded the heads of the largest banks in a parlor in his house, locked the door, and told them they had 10 minutes to agree. “This is the place to stop the trouble,” he announced.

It took the Panic of 1907 to see that old banking methods had to be reworked for the modern age. Morgan would work with Sen. Nelson Aldrich of New York during the next two years, and later Virginia Sen. Carter Glass, to develop a new system, what would become the Federal Reserve.

Just as the response to the Panic of 1907 brought change, will recent financial events require new thinking and new systems in global finance and banking? S

©March 31, 2009 – Richmond Style Weekly

Shaking off the rust

2009-03-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory restores Historic Jamestown items
Friday, March 20, 2009

By ROB PERRY
Staff writer
Southern Maryland Newspapers

Pieces of history have made a temporary home in Calvert County over the past five years, but will soon be heading back home to Virginia.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, hundreds of thousands of artifacts stored in Historic Jamestown, Va., were submerged in flood waters. Jamestown staff members attempted to prepare for the hurricane, but, according to Kenya Brown Fusciello, a conservator at the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum's Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab), the "combination of the hurricane and its related storm surge brought in waters from the nearby Pitch and Tar Swamp measuring 5-feet deep at the National Park Service Visitor Center."

According to an article written by Fusciello, the MAC Lab's current "Jamestown Project derives from Historic Jamestown, Va., where an archaeological assessment recovered artifacts including many iron and ceramic fragments, a significant number of them being Colonial period pipe fragments. These excavations, led by noted archaeologists J.C. Harrington and John Cotter, occurred between the 1930s and the 1950s. Subsequently, they were treated by Civilian Conservation Corps and National Park Service staff."

Due to the flood damage caused by Isabel, 34,000 archaeological items from the Colonial period were sent to the MAC Lab in St. Leonard in 2004. At the lab, staff members have been working to restore and clean the items prior to shipping them back to Jamestown in far better condition than they were received.

"I know that we have a very large facility [at the MAC Lab] and, I believe at the time, Jamestown did not have adequate space to accommodate a lot of the artifacts at the site that were affected," Fusciello said in an interview as to why the MAC Lab was a site chosen for the restorations, noting that Jamestown is home to more than 900,000 artifacts.

The artifacts included paper, wood, iron and ceramic items, each of which were "treated" by MAC Lab staff members. The treatment process is long, sometimes taking hours for a single item, and the 34,000 items received at the MAC Lab were treated by a staff of three people, and, at times, only two, Fusciello said.

"Normally it's just two people," Fusciello said. "The project started with just one conservator. I was initially hired as an assistant conservator. Right now, it's been three [staff members working on the project] to date. I hired one of my volunteers part-time, Mark Edmondson in addition to two other contractual conservators, assistant conservator, Nancy Shippen [working on the project] and Caitlin Shaffer."

The treatment process, Fusciello said, is different for each material. For example, she said the iron items, such as pipes, had been glossed with paraffin wax repeatedly over many years to offer some protection. Despite the wax, the iron artifacts "suffered some corrosion due to brackish water" from the flooding, Fusciello wrote.

At the MAC Lab, the iron items were placed in a solvent recycling still at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for six to eight hours. The process pulls wax off the object.

"Because these objects were waxed so much over the years, not all of it comes off but a good amount of it," Fusciello said. After the dewaxing, the items are put through a desalination process, which pulls salts from flood waters out of the iron.

"[The iron items] suffered a lot of corrosion because of that," she said.

After that, the iron pieces go through another process to return the iron back to the original color, which is a black finish. Finally, a coating of paraloid is put on for added protection.

"The treatment cycle is pretty long, and could take several months for a batch of irons, which can be approximately 200 to 300 pieces of iron," Fusciello said.

"The project itself is very routine and can be tedious. However, it is rewarding in a sense that the objects are being treated and returned on time and they look entirely different when they leave," she said.

The MAC Lab's involvement with the project is expected to end in September. But, there is still a chance for the public to come out and see firsthand how the work was done.

The MAC Lab will be hosting an open house on March 27. (Note: See linked article for more information)

The MAC Lab is still home to nearly 3,000 artifacts awaiting the restoration process.

During the open house, the public will be able to meet the staff and ask their own questions about the artifacts and the treatment process, Fusciello said.

rperry@somdnews.com
Copyright ©, 2009 Southern Maryland Newspapers - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Privacy Statement

Artifacts from Historic Jamestowne to be exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History beginning February 7

2009-02-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

This is from the websites of APVA’s Historic Jamestowne and the Smithsonian Institution; please see the links below.

Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake

Location: Second Floor; National Museum of Natural History
Exhibit: February 7, 2009 – February 6, 2011

Forensic anthropology, modern technology and archaeology converge to provide intriguing information on people and events of America's past. This exhibition explores history anew through 17th-century bone biographies – real life stories compiled from skeletal and burial investigations of early European and African immigrants to the Chesapeake Bay area. Scientists reveal how studies of human bones, found in sites ranging from Jamestown, Virginia to St. Mary’s City, Maryland, provide new information about the past, as well as who we are today.

Over 70 artifacts from the James Fort excavations at Historic Jamestowne will be part of the exhibition. The exhibit features the profound work of Dr. Doug Owsley, Division Head of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and explores how forensic science is expanding our understanding of life in 17th century America. What can we learn from bones? From burials? The answers, gathered from state-of-the-art scientific skeletal analysis, are remarkably detailed. Until fairly recently, scientists could only piece together the story of the early Chesapeake colonists from historical documents. Visitors to this exhibit will experience a vivid demonstration of how mysteries "locked" in our own skeleton and those hundreds of years old can be revealed. With the application of sophisticated modern forensic anthropology, archaeology, and historical research to recently excavated 17th century remains, the colonists themselves can tell their stories –- a legacy written in bone.

Among the Jamestown artifacts for the two-year loan are several objects currently featured in the Nathalie P. and Alan M. Voorhees Archaearium. These include the skeleton of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold and the finial from the ceremonial staff found in his grave. Dr. William Kelso, Director of Archaeology at Historic Jamestowne said “Gosnold was the primary force behind the expedition to Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, but his efforts have, for the most part, been lost to history. The opportunity to share Dr. Owsley's research at Jamestown with Smithsonian visitors provides a unique opportunity to share the story of Captain Gosnold with a vast international audience and feature the significance of the role he played at Historic Jamestowne and the role he played ultimately in the birthplace of America.”

While Gosnold's skeletal remains and other exhibited artifacts are on loan to the Smithsonian for Written in Bone, they will be represented in the Archaearium by full-scale fret-cut images. Visitors to the Archaearium also have the opportunity to view an exceptional collection of over 1,000 artifacts uncovered from ongoing excavations of James Fort, by the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological team, including a new display of several rare artifacts found during this summer's dig season.

Links: http://www.historicjamestowne.org/news/2008_smithsonian.php
http://www.historicjamestowne.org/news/2008_smithsonian.php

In Small Things Forgotten - James Deetz

2009-02-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

If you’re interested in a more complete and colorful understanding of the lives of the Jamestown (and other) colonists, you should get to know the works of James Deetz (1930-2000).

Deetz was among the earliest, and probably foremost, historical archeologists – who explain and give us a better understanding of what archeological findings tell us of the times when they were used.

We learn much about the way our early American colonial ancestors lived and were memorialized, in both the New England and southern colonies, from his In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1996). This is an updated and expanded edition of a classic of modern archaeology first published in 1977.

Deetz gathered, interpreted and published information about the daily life of the American colonists, including women and blacks, based on the analysis of domestic objects and architecture.

According to one reviewer, “This book…has something for everyone. It is written in a casual, accessible style that won't scare off a popular audience. The individual chapters offer primary evidence and gentle arguments in essay formats that are short and useful — perfect for high school or introductory undergrad reading assignments. Professional scholars with a background in material culture might not find much to chew on, but more traditional historians could benefit from an introduction to the possibilities of historical archaeology. All in all, more useful than many more ‘serious’ tomes.”

Others say, “History is recorded in many ways. According to…Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. Objects such as doorways, gravestones, musical instruments, and even shards of pottery fill in the cracks between large historical events and depict the intricacies of daily life. In [this] revised and expanded edition … Deetz has added a chapter addressing the influence of African culture on America – a culture so strong it survived the Middle Passage and the oppression of slavery – in the years following the settlers' arrival in Jamestown, Virginia.” “This book colorfully depicts a world hundreds of years in the past through details of ordinary living. New interpretations of archaeological finds detail how minorities influenced and were affected by the development of the Anglo-American tradition.”

Among Deetz’s observations:

• Evidence shows that until the 1660’s white and black servants lived on equal terms, often in the master’s house. Slavery based on race evolved over time.

• Subtle changes in building long before the Revolutionary War hinted at the growing independence of the American colonies and their desire to be less like the English.

• Records of estate auctions show that many households in Colonial America contained only one chair – underscoring the patriarchal nature of the early American family. All other members of the household sat on stools or the floor.

• The remains of clay smoking pipes in Maryland and Virginia demonstrate the intermixing of African and European technologies.

• The wide porch or veranda that has been such an important feature of early Southern homes (and absent from those in Georgian-style and colonial New England) and, later, all across America, was derived from a constant element of African architecture used in farm and plantation workers’ cabins and houses.

Being a Scot in the Chesapeake

2009-01-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

This post is adapted from the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project's blog for 1/24 (see the link below):

Today marks the 250th birthday of Robert Burns. For the most part, that event will go unnoticed in the United States. Apart from Scotch whiskey, there is little about Scotland that crosses the mind of the average modern American. And yet the Chesapeake region teemed with Scots men and women during the 18th century. Many were merchants, physicians, and educators and they, more than any other European nationals, gave rise to urban life in the Colonial Chesapeake. In no place is that clearer than in the towns along the Potomac River, especially Alexandria, Virginia, and Port Tobacco, Maryland.

The land title research that we have been working on has turned up many Scots and a strong connection between those of Alexandria and Port Tobacco. Thanks to David Dobson's Scots on the Chesapeake, 1607-1830 (Genealogical Publishing Company, Baltimore, 1992), we know a fair amount about the Alexandria Scots. Those of Port Tobacco, however, did not appear in many of the sources that Dobson used in his compilation. Local land and other legal records, however, have proven fruitful and we could easily add dozens of names to his list.

Lists of names, places of origin, occupations, and death dates are important data in developing a historical study of a select group of people; but those data have little to offer when we try to understand how those immigrants thought of their new lives in North America and how they felt about family and friends left in the Old World, perhaps never to be seen again.

Scotland's poet laureate had, at one time, considered emigrating to the New World. His short life may have been even shorter had he done so...disease and the hazards of sea travel took a heavy toll on immigrants of all ethnicities. He also would have been a late arrival, the majority of expatriate Scots having relocated to the Americas soon after the uprisings of 1715 and 1745, many in shackles and sold into indentured servitude. Robbie Burn's paeans to the land and people of Scotland did not yet exist when many Scots came to these shores, but I have no doubt that in the late 1700s many a Scot's eye would glisten upon hearing a recitation of Burns' My Heart's in the Highlands.

VIRGINIA COMPANY COLONIES’ EXHIBITION COINCIDES WITH BERMUDA’S 400TH ANNIVERSARY

2009-01-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – “Jamestown and Bermuda: Virginia Company Colonies,” a special exhibition March 1 through October 15, 2009, at Jamestown Settlement, a state-operated museum of 17th-century Virginia, will examine the shared history and links between England’s first two permanent colonies in the New World.

A companion lecture series will feature guest speakers at 7 p.m. on April 25, June 13, July 11 and August 8.

A British presence was established in Bermuda in 1609 when the Sea Venture, the flagship of a fleet en route to Jamestown in Virginia, was shipwrecked. Bermuda commemorates its 400th anniversary in 2009, two years after the Jamestown quadricentennial.

Beginning with the wreck of the Sea Venture, upon which Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” is based, the exhibition will trace Bermuda’s 400-year history, highlighting its importance as a strategic location and emergence as a premier travel destination in the 20th century. The Sea Venture’s passengers survived the disaster, built two smaller vessels in Bermuda and in 1610 sailed on to Virginia, leaving behind two people. More than two dozen objects from the Sea Venture underwater archaeological site will be exhibited courtesy of the Bermuda Maritime Museum.

Virginia and Bermuda were initially administered by the Virginia Company of London and later became British royal colonies. Today, Bermuda is the oldest self-governing British overseas territory. Legislative bodies formed in Virginia in 1619 and Bermuda in 1620 continue to the present and are represented in the exhibition with the Virginia House of Delegates Speaker’s chair, dating to the 18th century, and a 17th-century cedar chair from the Parliament of Bermuda.

Portraits of two British monarchs associated with Virginia and Bermuda – King James I and Queen Elizabeth II – and two early governors – Lord de la Warr, appointed Lord Governor and Captain General of Virginia by the Virginia Company in 1610, and Henry Hamilton, governor of Bermuda from 1785 to 1794 – will be exhibited.

Silver communion sets dating to the 17th century, from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hampton, Virginia, and St. Peter’s Church in St. George, Bermuda, symbolize the prominent role of the Church of England in both colonies.

The exhibition will feature items from the Earl Gregg Swem Library of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg related to St. George Tucker, an 18th-century Virginia judge and legal scholar born in Bermuda, and examples of Bermuda-made 17th- and 18th-century cedar furniture and silver spoons from the Tucker House in St. George, Bermuda, the 18th-century home of St. George Tucker’s brother Henry.

The American Revolution, American Civil War and World War II are among conflicts that have involved Bermuda because of its crossroads location in the Atlantic and proximity to the North American coast. Examples of Revolutionary era correspondence from the Swem Library, a painting depicting a Civil War blockade runner from The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and a World War II flyer from the Bermuda National Archives will be exhibited.

A late 19th-century watercolor painting by Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, loaned for the exhibition by the National Gallery of Canada, depicts Bermuda’s Hamilton Harbour. This painting brought Bermuda’s unique character to the attention of other artists, whose work influenced the development of Bermuda as a travel destination. A selection of paintings by leading American, Canadian and British artists depicting Bermuda scenes, including a game of croquet, will come to the exhibition from Bermuda’s Masterworks Foundation. Among them is “Banyan Tree Trunk” by Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, for part of her youth and taught art for two summers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The popularity of both Virginia and Bermuda as travel destinations will be illustrated with a display of posters and other promotional materials.

Located in Jamestown Settlement’s special exhibition gallery, “Jamestown and Bermuda: Virginia Company Colonies” is funded by grants from James City County and the Bank of Bermuda Foundation and other donations.

The St. George’s Foundation worked with the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the Virginia state agency that operates Jamestown Settlement, to facilitate artifact loans from Bermuda institutions.

The Saturday evening lecture series, funded with a grant from Dominion, features “The Lion and the Mouse … the Story of America and Bermuda” on April 25, presented by Bermuda filmmaker Lucinda Spurling; “The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America” on June 13, presented by University of Tennessee Professor of History Lorri Glover, co-author of a book with the same title as her talk; “Sister Colonies: Virginia, Bermuda, and the Beginnings of English America” on July 11, presented by University of Rochester Associate Professor of History Michael Jarvis; and “Somewhere Beyond the Sea: Art, Artists, and Bermuda” on August 8, presented by Founding and Creative Director Tom Butterfield of The Masterworks Foundation. Advance reservations are required for the free evening lectures at Jamestown Settlement’s Robins Foundation Theater by contacting (757) 253-4415 or rsvp.lecture@jyf.virginia.gov.

Jamestown Settlement, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, until 6 p.m. June 15 through August 15, is located southwest of Williamsburg on Route 31 at the Colonial Parkway next to Historic Jamestowne, site of the 1607 English settlement. Jamestown Settlement general admission of $14.00 for adults and $6.50 for ages 6 through 12 includes admission to the special exhibition. Permanent museum exhibits include expansive exhibition galleries and outdoor re-creations of an early 17th-century Powhatan Indian village, the three ships that brought America’s first permanent English colonists to Virginia in 1607 and a 1610-14 colonial fort.

For more information, call (888) 593-4682 toll-free or (757) 253-4838. A video and a background paper, both titled “The Story of the Sea Venture,” are available at www.historyisfun.org/jamestown-and-bermuda.htm.

Replica of Discovery handed over to Westenhanger Castle

2008-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

From Traditional Boast and Tall Ships Magazine

A replica of ‘Discovery’, one of the three ships that established the first English speaking colony in America, will formally be presented to Westenhanger Castle later on this week.

The ship will be given into the custody of the castle by the Jamestown UK Foundation, a charity which was set up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the New World.

The Chairman of the Jamestown UK Foundation, KCC Deputy Leader Alex King, will formally unveil a plaque to commemorate the handover. Attending the event will be other members of the foundation including Sir Robert Worcester KBE DL, the Lord Cornwallis OBE DL and Lady Cornwallis, the Rt Hon Michael Howard MP, a number of Kent Ambassadors and representatives from the US Embassy.

John Forge, the owner of the castle and Mark and Terry Whitling, who are distant descendents of Sir Thomas Smythe, will formally receive the ‘Discovery’.

Discovery Westenhanger Castle was the home of Sir Thomas Smythe, who obtained a Royal Charter in 1600 to set up the East India Company. He subsequently commissioned the construction of a number ships including ‘Discovery’.

The three ships left London on 19 December 1606 and arrived in Chesapeake Bay in April 1607. On 13 May 1607, the settlers landed in the area that went on to become Jamestown, Virginia.

A ‘Pocahontas’ mermaid sculpture designed by Georgia Mason and given to the people of Kent by the City of Norfolk, Virginia, will also be unveiled to take up permanent residence in the castle.

The well known Kent artist, Graham Clark, will also display his etching commemorating the 400th anniversary.

The handover event, which takes place exactly 402 years after the ships left London for the New World, also marks the closure of the UK’s commemorations of America’s 400th anniversary.

Relive Queen Elizabeth II's visit

2008-11-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

Her 2007 visit to Jamestown and Williamsburg is the subject of a PBS documentary series.

By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON | 757-247-4952
Hampton Roads Daily Press
November 11, 2008

Fans of Queen Elizabeth II will be able to relive her historic 2007 visit to Jamestown and Williamsburg when PBS presents the opening episode of "Monarchy, The Royal Family at Work," Wednesday, November 11 at 8 PM, local times.

The two-hour-long first installment of the documentary series focuses on the English monarch's tour of Historic Jamestowne, including the experiences of numerous local figures involved in the behind-the-scenes preparations for her May 2007 visit.

PBS describes the Virginia episode — titled "The State Visit" — as an "opportunity to follow the elaborate preparations in Virginia and Britain as the queen gets ready to visit America." The cameras follow the extensive arrangements at several different locations, including the archaeological dig at Historic Jamestowne and the Williamsburg Inn in Colonial Williamsburg.

Among the local figures featured are chief archaeologist William Kelso, the discoverer of James Fort, who is shown brushing up on royal etiquette before conducting a tour for the queen.

"You don't say it's a pleasure to meet you — because she already knows it's a pleasure to meet her," Kelso says, laughing as he readies himself to be the queen's guide.

"I'm just going to say, 'Your Majesty!' That's it."

Other scenes show the nervous staff of the inn as they make sure Her Majesty's rooms are prepared to an exacting standard of perfection.

Former Newport News resident Elizabeth Kostelny, now executive director of APVA Preservation Virginia — which owns the historic James Fort site — also figures prominently in the royal "walkabout" at Jamestown. Shown attending the queen as she mixed with the onlooking crowd, Kostelny is the American lady wearing the big hat.

"The queen's state visit to Historic Jamestowne brought worldwide attention to America's 400th anniversary commemoration and renewed awareness of the archaeological research that is revealing a new understanding of this nation's origins at Historic Jamestowne," she says.

"From the extraordinary preparations to the remarkable execution, this visit underscored the historic ties that our two nations share — beginning right here at Historic Jamestowne."

John Smith water trail advances

2008-10-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

From the Bethany Beach Wave@delawareonline.com
By Molly Murray • The News Journal • October 6, 2008

SEAFORD — For a moment, forget the houses, the barges and the signs of the 21st century on the Nanticoke River.

Instead, look at the thick woods, the bald eagles flying overhead, the deer running through the dense vegetation. See the wide sweep of marsh and the great blue heron as it snares a fish.

It is this world that Capt. John Smith saw in 1608 when he and a crew of 14 set sail from Jamestown, Va., in a 30-foot-long shallop to explore the Chesapeake Bay and some of its tributaries.

Of all the places Smith explored during that 2,500-mile journey, the two places that have changed the least since then are the Pocomoke and Nanticoke rivers, said Jim Rapp, executive director of the Delmarva Low Impact Tourism Experiences, an organization that is working to expand low-impact ecotourism on the Delmarva Peninsula.

Now local groups, individuals and municipal and state officials in Delaware and Maryland are working with the National Park Service as the federal agency plans the new Capt. John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. Once completed, the trail will be the nation's first national water trail.

Rapp believes it could do for the Chesapeake watershed what the Appalachian Trail did for the vast mountain range that stretches from Maine to Georgia.

Last week, National Park Service officials started a series of meetings to get people throughout the region involved and to outline what they are looking at as they develop a comprehensive management plan for the John Smith trail.

The first of those meetings was held in Seaford. Although Smith never made it as far as modern-day Seaford when he came up the Nanticoke, he made a brief foray into Delaware when he meandered off the Nanticoke into Broad Creek and landed at what is now Phillips Landing.

Seaford could play an important role in the development of tourism-based activities linked to the trail, Rapp said.

John Maounis, superintendent of the John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, said work on the plan is just beginning.

"We really want to hear from everybody," he said.

What parks officials are looking for now is public input on several fronts. First, Maounis said, they want to know how people anticipate using the trail. Will they paddle or boat along Smith's routes? Are they interested in organized boat tours? Will they visit sites on land by following an overland route that closely matches the places Smith explored during his journey? Will they bike or walk some overland link to the water trail?

"One of our quandaries," Maounis said, "is there are so many opportunities."

Park officials know some visitors want to connect with an earlier time and are looking to see a world much like the one Smith encountered. That experience isn't very likely along some of the routes Smith took, but along the Pocomoke and Nanticoke, the landscape in some areas is less changed than along other tributaries, Rapp said.

Some trail users might be most interested in the American Indians that Smith encountered on his journey. The Algonquin Indians, led by the great chief Powhatan, had a complex society. Smith also encountered the Nanticoke Indians and was told of "a great nation called Massawomeck."

Essentially, parks officials are looking at three broad themes: where Smith went, American Indian life at the time and how the Chesapeake has changed. Sometime next spring, parks officials hope to have a series of options and will host another round of public meetings to get input, Maounis said.

Delaware and Maryland officials already worked together to produce a map aimed at attracting trail-based tourism to the Nanticoke.

The map, called "The Nanticoke River, Explorers Welcome," highlights natural areas such as the Ellis Bay Wildlife Management Area in Maryland and the Nanticoke Wildlife Area in Delaware, pinpoints public boat launching areas along the river and highlights many of the places visitors could see -- from Seaford and Bethel to Mardela Springs.

There are already dozens of attractions, from museums to parks, that people could visit, Rapp said.

The weak link is in the infrastructure to support the trail -- inns, camping and other accommodations and the transportation network that would get people in boats, canoes or kayaks from the water trail to points of interest or accommodations on land.

Rapp said there are several models local residents could explore to keep private land off limits or to allow some public access.

And there will likely be opportunities for good outfitters and historical interpreters or guides, Rapp said.

"You can't PowerPoint this stuff," he said. "There are all these rich stories."

mmurray@delawareonline.com

302-856-7372

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 9

2008-10-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

The Virginia Diaspora: Jamestown’s Legacy of
America’s Great Westward Migration
(continued)

The personal initiative and ambition that propelled the Jamestown explorers from England to America was also the singular force that drove their Virginian descendants farther to seek land, new prospects and lives. Their confidence and resolve to do so sprang from their security in their capacity to gain title to their own property and ability to freely buy and sell it, both confirmed by their ancient planter ancestors.

Just as meaningful for today’s Americans is those Virginian pioneers’ legacy of the great westward migration that spread a new American nation to the far edge of the continent. In Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, Fischer and Kelly describe exactly how the Virginia Diaspora of the 18th and 19th centuries became the American westward pioneering movement. The settlement of America’s west had many of the same adventuring characteristics as those of the founding of Jamestown in seventeenth century.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other settlers’ descendants managed the greatest expansion of our new country with the Louisiana Purchase, to the distress of many New Englanders and other Americans who felt that America was then big enough. One reason, economic historians Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff tell us, was that, “In New England, immigration virtually halted after 1640, and natural causes became the source of population growth after 1650.” The halt was caused, Hinderaker and Mancall add, by “…the English Civil War; rather than emigrate to America, English Puritans stayed home and supported the revolutionary regime of Oliver Cromwell and the protectorate government.”

Fischer and Kelly also inform us, “The Jeffersons, Randolphs, Merriweathers, Lewises and Clarks had been part of Virginia’s westward movement…for as many as five generations before 1803.” Virginians Lewis and Clark (who was a descendant of Jamestown early settlers) then led their famous exploration of the nation’s new acquisition to help open the way for settlement of the lands in the vast Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia River basins. Fischer and Kelley go on to say, “The Louisiana expedition of 1804-6 was the culmination of a long historical process of expansion in Virginia”.

They also tell how we have taken the Jamestown colonists’ intrepid vision to the far corners of our continent in pursuit of land, opportunity and fortune. Their descendants moved on to create new states and governments modeled on what their ancestors had devised and established, and, joined by immigrants from other states, lands and cultures, they merged diverse traditions and customs to seek economic and social betterment. Historian William Shade tells us, “By 1850 nearly 400,000 Virginians had been attracted to more fertile soils and opportunities in other states”. That year, the Commonwealth’s population was just over 1.4 million, including almost a half million slaves.

The economic motivations and goals of the Jamestown settlers have continued to resonate across four centuries in the migrants and homesteaders that pushed out America’s frontiers, generation by generation, first from Virginia to the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, to Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, and then on to Illinois, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and, finally, California.

The headrights’ legacy was once again evident in the 1862 Homestead Act that would accelerate the settlement of the new American West with land grants for individual farms and ranches. It was the same economic incentive principle innovated by the Virginia Company, expanded on a monumental scale. By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications had been processed and more than 270 million acres – 10 percent of all U.S. lands – passed into private individual ownership.

In Bound Away, Fischer and Kelly also tell us that a significant number of California’s own pioneers, 1840-1860, were native Virginians. Several (and probably many more) had ancestors who were among the Colony’s ancient planters and early settlers. Virginians and their descendants among other southerners had extraordinary influence on California politics and government during those years, and they nearly succeeded in splitting the state in two in 1860.

Countless thousands among the California settlers that followed during the next five to ten decades undoubtedly carried that same ancestry and initiative. As Fischer and Kelly also say, “Thus the ghosts of Virginians past also migrated to California and took up residence on the Pacific Coast.”

Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy

Viewing Jamestown through a 21st century California prism, one might also see that the 1849 Gold Rush probably was, ironically, the ultimate and successful, albeit belated, achievement of an early major goal that was set for the Virginia Company’s explorers and settlers. However, the most important of their legacies was their determination to succeed. With that fortitude, they and their descendants also forged the unique and enduring element of our American culture: a persistent striving for the freedom to better ourselves with property, innovation and enterprise.

This is the Jamestown legacy that has become our American credo and is the real meaning of its founding. Its first seeds were sown there over 400 years ago and today all Americans enjoy its fruits. This is why Jamestown remains relevant and significant for each and every one of us, and we should forever remember its founding as the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities for the economic and political innovations and enterprise that have made our nation what it is.

Our American heritage of initiative and improvement has come down to us from that Jamestown adventure. It is where a new people – who many of us (and more than most of us realize) have as ancestors – learned to govern themselves and determine their (and our) destiny. We should appreciate its lessons and legacies and that many of our personal and national aspirations for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were formed there during its nine decades of existence.

This is the ninth and final part
Copyright 2008

These are some of sources and references used for Beyond Its Beginning:

Billings, Warren M.:
A Little Parliament; The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century; (Richmond, The Library of Virginia, in partnership with Jamestown 2007/Jamestown Yorktown Foundation. 2004)
Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia; (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press 2004)
Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation; (Gettysburg, Thomas Publications, for the Colonial National Historical Park and Eastern National Park & Monument Association 1991);
Editor: The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century; A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700, Revised Edition; (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, 2007.)
Sir William Berkeley; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/billings_essay.html)

Dorman, John Frederick (Editor):
Adventurers of Purse and Person Virginia 1607-1624/5; Fourth Edition; 3 v. (Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004-7).

Elson, Henry William, and Leigh, Kathy (editor);
History of the United States of America; (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1904.) as adapted for History of the USA:

Fausz, J. Frederick:
The First Act of Terrorism in English America; (History News Network, January 16, 2006) –
Jamestown at 400: Caught Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope; (History News Network, May 7, 2007) –

Fischer, David Hackett:
Albion's Seed; Four British Folkways in America; (Oxford and New York, The Oxford University Press; 1989)

Fischer, David Hackett, and Kelly, James C.:
Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2001.)

Greene, Jack P.:
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788; the Richard B. Russell Lectures, Number Two. (Athens, Georgia, The University of Georgia Press, 1986).
Roundtable: Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.
The William and Mary Quarterly 64.2 (2007):
29 pars. 1 Mar. 2008 .
The Quest for Power; The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies 1689-1776; (Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1963.)

Heinemann, Ronald L., Kolp, John G., Parent, Anthony S. and Shade, William G.:
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007; (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2007.)

Hinderaker, Eric and Mancall, Peter:
At the Edge of Empire; The Backcountry in British North America; (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2003)

Horn, James P. P:
Leaving England: The Social Background of Indentured Servants in the Seventeenth Century; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/horn_essay.html)

Howard, Jennifer:
Artifacts Rewrite Jamestown's History, (Chronicle of Higher Education May 4, 2007)

Kelso, William M.:
Jamestown; The Buried Truth; (Charlottesville, The University Press of Virginia; 2006.)

Kluger, Richard:
Seizing Destiny; How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.)

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl:
The Jamestown Project; (Cambridge MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.)
America's Founding Fictions; Washington Post, Sunday, May 13, 2007;
(Editor); Major Problems in American Colonial History (2nd edition), (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
Captain John Smith; A Select Edition of His Writings; (Chapel Hill and London, UNC Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg; 1988.)

Mancall, Peter C.:
(Editor) The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624; An anthology of essays from an international conference entitled “The Atlantic World and Virginia 1550-1624”, held at Williamsburg, Va., Mar. 4-7, 2004 (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007).
Hakluyt’s Promise; An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America; (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007)
(Editor) Envisioning America; English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640; (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. 1995.).

Mapp, Alf J., Jr.:
The Virginia Experiment: The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America; 1607-1781; 3rd Edition (Lanham, MD, Hamilton Press. 1987 – Reprinted as 4th Edition, Lincoln, Nebraska, An Authors Guild Backprint.com Edition, iUniverse, 2006)

McCartney, Martha W.:
Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary;(Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Company. 2007)
A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803; (Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation – prepared for the Colonial National Historical Park, National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Cooperative Agreement CA-4000-2-1017; 2003.)

Morgan, Edmund S.:
The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630; The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1971), pp. 170-198; Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1917308

Nugent, Nell Marion:
Cavaliers and pioneers; abstracts of Virginia land patents and grants, v. 1: 1623-1666; (Baltimore, Genealogical Pub. Co., 1969)

Richards, Leonard K.:
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War; (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Richter, Daniel K.:
Facing East from Indian County; A Native History of Early America; (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001)

Smith, John (author), and Barbour, Philip L. (editor):
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith; at Shifflett, Crandall: (Virtual Jamestown; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Research Project, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy) 2007.

Whittenburg, James P.:
After the Fort: Jamestown, circa. 1620-1699; (Jamestown Interpretive Essays, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/whittenburg_essay.html)

For further information and details on these and other citations, contact jhmccall1@gmail.com

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 8

2008-10-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Virginia Diaspora: Jamestown’s Legacy of
America’s Great Westward Migration

One lesser-known legacy was the lessons learned from the experiences, losses and mistakes in launching Jamestown. John Smith went on to use them and others’ reports of settlers’ “seasoning” and travails to make and promote recommendations for the organization and conduct of future model colonies for those who also would want to emigrate to America for any of several reasons, such as the religious persecution suffered by the Pilgrims.

This legacy then gave succeeding English and British colonization efforts, first in Massachusetts and Maryland, and then elsewhere in America and around the world, more realistic direction, instructions and expectations that had better results. Smith was its most articulate and effective advocate, and it served to help establish the British Empire. It also went on to later serve in our own nation’s vast expansion and settlement.

By 1640, the first generation of descendants of Jamestown’s ancient planters and other early settlers began searching for new lands to settle north and west of Jamestown in the upper Chesapeake and the uplands and foothills – away from the Tidewater. Other colonists soon were joining them, and also started an incessant quest even farther; a few were encouraged by Berkeley’s efforts and promotions to settle Carolina during Jamestown’s third and fourth decades, which also was named for and chartered as a new (albeit West Indies-based) colony by Charles II in 1663.

The changed social structure and class and economic pressures that had been evolving since the 1630s also impelled marginal farmers and new landowners (who had fulfilled their servitude obligations) to the extremities of the settled colony, where they faced displaced native tribes and the many other challenges of pioneering settlers. The 1670 disenfranchisement of small landowners and tenants also likely added to the nascent wave. Dr. Horn tells us, “…increasingly after 1675 [there was] a significant movement of people out of the region” that included “thousands of ex-servants for whom the Chesapeake held no future”.

Unfortunately for them, they were also soon followed and challenged for the land by Virginia’s new elite. Cultural historians David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly tell us, “During the late seventeenth century, …former servants moved into the piedmont and settled as squatters on the land. They were quickly pushed aside by the grandees of the tidewater who acquired title to the best soil through their access to power”. Together, though, they expanded the colony ever farther as the displaced settlers moved onward.

The new century also brought a new and unprecedented immigration flow from the politically volatile border regions of England and Scotland, Ulster (northern Ireland) and Germany that also brought new customs, architecture and religious beliefs to the growing colony. By then, according to business historian Richard Tedlow, “Great Britain boasted the most advanced advertising. …Among the items being sold, few if any caused more excitement than the New World itself. Signs and handbills touting its wonders were so ubiquitous in London that [historian] Richard Hofstadter has observed that America was conceived amidst ‘one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world.’ Daniel J. Boorstin [Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987] believes that such promotion may have had a significant impact on the speed of emigration and has wondered about the impact on American civilization of the fact that ‘there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising’”.

Virginia’s piedmont, Southside and backcountry frontiers and beyond were the ultimate destinations for many of these new immigrants, plus Americans from other colonies. There, they joined the settlers who were already on those outskirts seeking new opportunities, land and independence from the planter aristocracy of the Tidewater and Northern Neck.

By the 18th century’s third quarter, Virginians began moving over the Appalachians and westward along the banks of the Ohio River. “Along with ‘Plenty of good land,’ Adam Smith wrote in his section on the ‘Causes of Prosperity in New Colonies’ in the Wealth of Nations, ‘liberty to manage their own affairs [in] their own way’ was one of the ‘two great causes of the prosperity’ of the British colonies in America”.

Within two decades, Virginia would give its Revolutionary War veterans warrants for bounties of potential farmland in the Commonwealth. The infant nation had no other resources but land to compensate them (similar to the Virginia Company’s impecunious position at the end of the colony’s first decade). These bounties took the settler veterans farther into its hinterlands; they soon were in western Virginia and the future states of Kentucky and Ohio and as far as Illinois along the Mississippi. The legacy of land ownership by the common citizen that had been established at early Jamestown (with the headrights system) manifested itself with these bounty claims as our nation’s early history unfolded.

This is the eighth of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora continues and Jamestown’s Most Important Legacy.
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 7

2008-10-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

Jamestown’s Final Years

The last quarter of the 17th century would prove to be Jamestown’s final years as the seat of the colonial government. Berkeley’s governance policies that fostered Virginia’s independent self-rule and his advocacy of free trade put him at odds with the increasingly restrictive imperial policies of the newly restored crown. He was aging and also found himself contending with a restive element of lesser Virginians who began to chafe under the increasing power ambitions of the great plantation owners who, being in Berkeley’s circle, dominated the Old Dominion’s politics and economy. A group of rebellious colonists led by Nathaniel Bacon, a relatively new settler, took issue with the governor’s policies for land grants and acquisition and dealing with continuing Indian raids on their settlements, which quickly degenerated into Virginia’s (and America’s) first, albeit brief, civil war, when they seized and burned Jamestown and its statehouse in 1676.

The result was a show of imperial military force from London and Berkeley’s sacking, plus increased royal control and succeeding governors who “…were determined to bend the Virginians to their sovereign’s wishes”. They were unable, however, to pressure the councilors and burgesses into restructuring the colony with urban or town centers, or move quickly to fund the reconstruction of the statehouse. Nevertheless, it was eventually rebuilt (and became “…the largest secular public building in 17th century America”), but burned again in 1698.

By 1700, Virginia’s capital was relocated to Williamsburg, about eight miles away. The change was profound, as Jamestown was the colonial capital, and, as historian Daniel Richter tells us, “Williamsburg was designed to be an imperial capital. The place actually symbolizes everything the Founding Fathers set out to replace…Its Governor’s Palace embodied royal majesty; its Capitol…symbolized the balance of aristocratic and democratic, imperial and provincial, power…These and other imperial associations were one reason the republican revolutionaries moved their government to Richmond and left Williamsburg a virtual ghost town until its twentieth century tourist rebirth”.

The major impact of the new gubernatorial regimes was a subordination of the House of Burgesses and new constraints and diminishment of its powers. Billings tells us that the Bacon-led “revolt also awakened [Virginians] to the lesser planters’ discontents and the need to ensure that such rancor would never again burst into rebellion. [That policy would be effective for almost 100 years.] All acknowledged an intrusive crown for what it was, a threat to the General Assembly and the great planters’ dominance of it”.

The colonists, retaining the memory of their taste of virtually independent self-government during the interregnum, continued stubborn but steadfast resistance to the imperial efforts to emasculate their capacity to govern themselves. The end of the Stuart reign and England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) signaled the crown’s increased efforts to tighten colonial control. However, the Crown’s vice-regents “…failed to achieve Stuart visions of empire. They hedged the General Assembly, and just as it stood at the breaking point, the downfall of James II and accession of William and Mary directed the empire builders’ attentions elsewhere. From the 1690s onward, the Assembly’s quest for power was as much a striving to recover lost ground as to claim new terrain.”

Rights and privileges similar to those conceived and confirmed initially at Jamestown were also adopted in other, simultaneously evolving colonial constitutions. Their pursuit and enjoyment were to create political tensions that would increase with the decades of the 18th century. The Virginia colonists saw their established and inherent rights as Englishmen, as well as those they had acquired during the ninety years of Jamestown’s existence, increasingly beleaguered; their constitutional struggles with the crown and parliament persisted as the century wore on. Those tensions and struggles, also experienced by fellow Americans in New England and other colonies, would eventually escalate into our Revolution.

By the late 17th century, Jamestown was no longer serving as Virginia’s primary port as facilities in other riverside communities were developed. With both its economic and political functions reduced, it was eventually abandoned during the 18th century and reverted to farmland, which, with the exception of a lone mid-17th century brick church tower, covered the remains, buildings and artifacts of those who had established and sustained it for nine decades.

This is the seventh of nine parts; next: The Virginia Diaspora.
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 6

2008-09-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

The Taste of Independence

The English Civil War and succeeding eight years of rule without a royal governor had an important effect on Jamestown’s and, subsequently, our history in two ways. According to historian Henry William Elson, “For the first and only time during the colonial period Virginia enjoyed absolute self-government. Not only the assembly [sic], but the governor and council were elective for the time, and the people never forgot this taste of practical independence.” This memory is a thread that continued in the increasingly contentious political disputes among the colonies and factions in the British government and establishment from the late 17th and on through the first three quarters of the 18th centuries, when the colonies famously rebelled for our independence.

Elson continued, “The other respect in which the triumph of the Roundheads in England affected Virginia was that it caused an exodus of Cavaliers from England to the colony, similar to the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts…twenty years before.” These new aristocratic immigrants – while a fraction of the number of Puritans – exacerbated social stratification, for the “Cavaliers …were of a far better class than were those who had first settled the colony.” Their incursion began to harden the colony’s societal structure into a new form of American aristocracy. It also began to marginalize some descendants of early settlers who had come on either the strength of their hopes for better economic prospects or to flee the arbitrary class constraints that their offspring now saw emerging to hinder their own upward mobility and freedom.

Billings further says, “For ordinary Virginians, hard times started with the restoration of King Charles II in 1660. The king, his brother, James, Duke of York [later, James II], and their underlings came back to England determined to mold Virginia to their conceptions of empire. They presupposed an imperial system grounded in social order, political obedience, military security and the exclusion of the Dutch from the Virginia trade. [The Dutch, one of the colony’s major trading partners, were soon to be evicted from New York, née New Amsterdam.] Achieving the vision meant limiting [Virginia’s] independence. ”

Meanwhile, the unique and extraordinary opportunity for land ownership by the private citizen had materialized as a reward for indentured servitude in raising tobacco and other forms of labor. This inducement drew shiploads of opportunity seekers from throughout economically distressed and overpopulated England, plus many from Europe. The result of this new wealth creation was that by the second half of the 17th century, “more than 40 percent of members of the House of Burgesses had previously been servants.”

The Bitter Legacy

The first group of “20. and Odd” Africans is known to have been landed at Jamestown in late August 1619 in an unknown state of bondage. They joined a number who were already there, which would gradually increase from between thirty and fifty to the low hundreds during the colony’s first half century, while the English influx grew by tens of thousands. They are thought to have been initially bound to agricultural labor and service under terms similar to the contracts or indentures for specified numbers of years with which many English immigrants had paid for their passage, as “no such condition of lifetime servitude was recognized in English or Virginia law at that time.” An indeterminate number achieved their freedom and the capacity to acquire land and property of their own, but others later found themselves bound by what proved to be indefinite terms.

These were the beginnings of the form of chattel slavery that ultimately became a bitter and divisive social legacy for the new American nation. In the 1640s, following the leads of the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies, the Virginia Assembly began enacting policies and laws that fated almost all Africans and African Americans in the colony to a permanent underclass and involuntary servitude.

In 1661, the new Commonwealth began institutionalizing racially based slavery, "making it de jure". With the emergence of the new elite ruling class during Berkeley’s governorship came an attitude among its members toward the lower classes, particularly Africans and African-Americans, that reflected much less humanity and tolerance, and a facility to arbitrarily relegate them to an inferior or the lowest position in society.

Virginia’s tobacco labor force was predominately composed of English indentured servants until the 1670s, when that immigration flow slowed to a trickle and increasing numbers of laborers were needed to work the colony’s tobacco fields. Historian Martha W. McCartney wrote that, “It is estimated that 75,000 whites emigrated from the British Isles to the Chesapeake colonies between 1630 and 1680, when tobacco consumption was on the rise. Half-to-three-quarters of these people were indentured servants, many of who were poor, unskilled youths. Planters were especially eager to procure male workers to work in their tobacco fields and during the 1630s six times as many men as women became indentured servants”. However, she also tells us that for several decades onward, “…approximately four out of five newly arrived immigrants still perished”.

As economic conditions in the mother country improved in the last third of the century, the attraction of the servitude arrangement faded and it became more difficult to recruit this form of labor. The options of a slave-based work force became more interesting and were enhanced by a new source of supply, as restrictions on the slave trade disappeared and ships under numerous flags, including Boston, brought confined and constrained Africans to Virginia. Almost three generations after the Africans’ first landing, the appalling legacy of racially based slavery took hold as part of Virginia’s economic foundation in the 1660s, and slaves had become dominant in the work force by the mid-1680s. By 1705, relatively few English indentured servants were arriving in Virginia, and chattel slavery was fully institutionalized, so to remain for another 160 years. Its vestiges would remain well into the 20th century.

According to McCartney, “One of the reasons that the history of the seventeenth century continues to command so much of our attention is that, through the first three quarters of that century, alternative, less deplorable, outcomes appear to have been possible”. Jamestown’s legacies, thorns and all, would soon spread beyond Virginia.

This is the sixth of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 5

2008-09-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

A New Dominant Culture

The English immigration surge that began in the 1620s established a new dominant culture as the colonists began to outnumber the Algonquians by the 1630s. Dr. Fausz tells us of the March 1622 Algonquian attack, “That terrible, traumatic ’Flood of Blood,’ as John Donne so graphically described it, was immediately recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a major watershed event, different from anything that English citizens had ever experienced”.

It provoked a sea change in the colonists’ attitudes and treatment of their indigenous neighbors; it also stimulated their “…measured, tempered military campaign that was neither ideological nor genocidal in intent or result. They quickly learned to coexist with their Indian enemies by forging enlightened alliances with Indian friends—and by repudiating both Christian conversion and Christian crusades as dysfunctional and dangerous practices”. Conflict between natives and colonists continued for another decade after 1622. It was then rekindled with another major raid in 1644, led by the Powhatans’ then elderly chief, with the loss of over 400 colonists’ lives. He was captured, but murdered, and another and seemingly final peace treaty was negotiated in 1646, which also established America’s first Indian reservations.

However, the pressures created by the English settlements became irresistible as their numbers spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater and Eastern Shore and into Maryland by 1650. Professor Peter C. Mancall estimates that more than 160,000 English emigrated to the American colonies in the 17th century, of whom 116,000 went to the Chesapeake region. Historian James P. Horn also estimates that “During the 1630s and 1640s the immigration averaged about 8,000-9,000 per decade, but in 1650 to 1680, 16,000-20,000 entered the Chesapeake each decade—the equivalent of England’s second city, Bristol.” Still, the mortality rate for the new immigrants remained at well over 70 percent.

The Virginia Indian tribes were overwhelmed by this, the first wave of the one of the largest mass migrations of the history of humankind. They were also decimated by new European diseases and fought a protracted and futile war against the never-ending influx of immigrants. The second half of the 17th century brought their increasing subjugation, relocation and banishment.

As more and more new settlers arrived and the century wore on, they moved incessantly inland and upland, and displaced native tribes reacted with responses ranging from accommodation and coexistence to resistance and violence during the 1660s and 1670s. The newest settlers especially would often also react with retribution for the violence and include those accommodating tribes among their targets for extirpation. Historians Eric Hinderaker and Mancall estimate that, “Of …twenty thousand Indians who inhabited the Chesapeake on the eve of English settlement, some two thousand were left by the 1670s. The colony’s population, meanwhile, had grown to more than forty thousand”. Anthony Parent also estimates that this Indian population was “an 85 percent decline from the first contact with the English at Jamestown”. Thus, the legacy of over 200 years of devastation of American Indian culture and life began at Jamestown during the latter half of the 17th century.

The Berkeley Era’s Legacies

Billings also tells us, “Rendering an assessment of all [the colony’s governors] is difficult because an absence of records all but obscures their abilities and the individual marks they put upon the colony.” Most of Jamestown’s governmental records were destroyed at Richmond’s destruction during our Civil War, yet there is enough left to know that the colony’s growth took on new dimensions and energy with Charles I’s appointment of Sir William Berkeley as governor in 1641.

Berkeley succeeded a series of royal surrogates of varied quality and distinction who for almost a decade and a half had kept the colony in a state of uncertainty ranging from turmoil and emergency to stabilization, conciliation and reform. According to Billings, “Berkeley’s thirty-five year tenure marks him as one of Virginia’s most significant chief executives; he was also one of the most controversial. Berkeley stood with that handful who closely identified themselves with leading Virginians and their interests, even when those interests opposed the Crown’s…His arrival was also timely, for he governed Virginia during the crucial decades from the 1640s to the 1690s. These were the years when the General Assembly matured into a miniature parliament, and political power was divided between the provincial [i.e., colonial] and the county governments. Berkeley encouraged both developments for they comported with his political style.”

During most of its existence, and at his arrival, the Assembly consisted of the governor, twelve to sixteen councilors that he appointed, and the Burgesses that were elected by each county and Jamestown. Berkeley soon saw the need and benefits from governing the colony with a form of bicameral legislature that was to become a template, over the coming century, for our Congress and most of our state governing bodies.

His first step was to encourage the House of Burgesses to meet as a body separately from the Assembly. He also appointed Virginians to the key offices in the colony, including continuing the tradition of maintaining civilian control of the militias or military, as had been the policy since Company days. The colonial burgesses also concurrently initiated what developed into our unique congressional institution of an elected Speaker of the House (which differed significantly from the English crown-appointed version).

At the same time, English history was taking a turn that would greatly affect Jamestown. After years of political contention and violence, the monarchy and its royalist adherents (“Cavaliers”) and the Puritan-led Parliament (“Roundheads”) squared off in 1642 in the English Civil War; Berkeley had arrived just before it began. In 1646, the Roundheads began prevailing; three years later, Charles I was beheaded, and, by 1650, the interregnum commenced. England became a Commonwealth and then a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Parliament also recast Virginia as a Commonwealth.

Parliament then commissioned four Virginians to gain the colony’s obedience to the new regime, Berkeley’s resignation and interdiction of Dutch trade for the benefit of a London mercantile monopoly. In 1652, a Parliamentary enforcement fleet was sent to Jamestown and, for the first time, the colony experienced an English military force, which obliged Berkeley to step down and surrender a royalist-leaning Virginia to the new rulers. During the interregnum, the Burgesses dominated the colonial government. Councilors and governors were also elected, but were relatively passive.

On May 3, 1660, anticipating the restoration of the monarchy, the Assembly took a major step on our nation’s road to self-determination when it elected Berkeley to the governorship, who was also then reaffirmed by Charles II. He chose to retain almost all of the members of the Assembly, whether royalist or not.

This is the fifth of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 4

2008-09-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Jamestown’s Earliest Legacies

To spur colonial agriculture, the Company introduced a policy of granting 100 acres (known as “headrights”) to each of those settlers who had arrived before 1616, paid their own passage and remained for three years (known as “ancient planters”); they were also granted another 50 acres for each person for whom they paid passage. Later settlers and colonial landowners received 50 acres’ headrights as incentives for underwriting the immigration of more laborers and settlers. The Company also made similar grants to its investors in lieu of a dividend that it was unable to pay from profits. These became the New World’s first land patents (or deeds in our modern vernacular) owned by common citizens, instead of by the crown, aristocracy or Church, as had been the time immemorial practice in Europe and England. By 1623 – only 16 years after the first Jamestown settlers had arrived – all landholdings were converted to private ownership.

The Company also succumbed to the inefficiencies of its policy of centralizing the trading of needed commodities, imports and exports solely through its “magazines” (conceptually similar to company-owned stores). In 1620, it freed the colonists to seek and trade for their own needs with whomever they desired, giving birth to the free enterprise system.

By then, they also had started our real estate industry, as land ownership, investing and transactions among common citizens became one of the essential elements and basic drivers of the colony’s and what would be our future nation’s economy. This would become an important pool of capital for future American economic independence.

After seven years of tension, rapprochement and frequent violence, a tentative peace between the settlers and the Powhatans (the Algonquian Tidewater tribal federation) stemmed from the abduction and 1614 marriage between the renowned native princess Matoaka (“Pocahontas”) and John Rolfe, the creator of the new Virginia tobacco blend, who were literally the parents of the new tobacco industry.

The Algonquian culture included successful tobacco farming and it seems certain that the Powhatans assisted the colonists in securing Jamestown’s economic survival and assuring Virginia’s permanence. The promise of success of this new industry encouraged the Company to send more settlers, including the first groups of women, which gave the colony a new foundation of families for its long-term continuity and growth.

At the same time, Jamestown’s remote governance – at least a six to ten weeks’ voyage from London – was proving unfeasible. In 1619, the Company authorized the colony to elect a representative legislature – the General Assembly – that would enable the settlers to manage their local affairs and finances and govern themselves more effectively and expeditiously. It was composed of “burgesses” elected by each of the colony’s settlements, the Company’s royally appointed governor and a council of state (appointed councillors, or advisors). Almost all male colonists (“every free man and company tenant”) were enfranchised from the Assembly’s creation in 1619 until 1670, when property ownership became a voting qualification (and would remain so, in Virginia, for almost another two hundred years).

1622 and the following two years brought matters to a head and set the stage for a major change in the colony’s status and structure. There had been major dissatisfaction with the Virginia Company’s policies and lack of business success and profits for some time. The potential for Virginia’s opportunities was also apparently beginning to dawn on the crown and the rest of the English establishment, despite James I’s abhorrence of tobacco.

In March 1622, the Powhatans and their allies mounted a well-planned and coordinated surprise attack throughout the colony to drive the English from their ancestral homelands that shattered the tenuous eight-year peace and left over a quarter of the settlers dead. The score of outlying plantations were decimated but warnings spared Jamestown itself.

The effect of the assault on the colony was not unlike that of the terrorists’ plane crashes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon almost four centuries later. The news of this catastrophe was one of the final blows for its private backers. New settlers who then arrived on the Abigail from London in spring 1623 introduced a virulent epidemic that killed more settlers than the Powhatan raids, which helped to precipitate the Virginia Company’s demise. There was a realization that less than one of six had survived of about 7,000 of those who had emigrated to establish Virginia.

The End of the Beginning

These were chief among the factors that brought about the commission of a royal inquiry, the revocation of the Company’s charter and its dissolution in 1624. James I died in March 1625 without resolving the colony’s status and was succeeded by his son, Charles I, who made Virginia a crown province. The Virginia Company’s investors were wiped out with a loss estimated at over £200,000 (as valued at the time, or the 2007 equivalent of over $27,000,000). The new monarch soon reaffirmed the colonists’ land ownership rights, but not their elected legislature, creating uncertainty for it. The crown’s governors then ruled Virginia for the next one hundred fifty one years, except for two brief spans.

Jamestown was followed by the English settlements and colonies in Massachusetts in 1620 and Maryland in 1634. The Dutch also had established New Amsterdam in 1624 (which, about forty years later, became New York). Free enterprise began to thrive as Virginians were shipping 300,000 pounds of tobacco annually by 1627 and soon were establishing active trade relations with those settlements, England and Europe.

Jamestown remained the colonial capital after 1624, but the life of the colony began flowing out into the ever-growing tobacco plantations owned by increasingly wealthy settler families, who began to be joined slowly by English aristocracy who saw new fortunes in the Tidewater. The agrarian form of Virginia’s economy did not foster the growth of towns and cities, as in New England, but efforts to further the development of Jamestown continued. A new colonial administration resolved to center trade there in 1631–32, but other attempts to centralize economic and local governmental functions would not succeed because of the population dispersion throughout the plantations.

The Assembly, in the absence of royal direction, soon resumed managing local fiscal policies and law making, administration and adjudication, filling a political vacuum that neither the governor nor his councilors could. This concept of local governance was adopted by other colonies for similar reasons and set a precedent for their own lawmaking and fiscal capacities, enabling them to be self-reliant. These capacities would become the touchstone for their mutual independence with Virginia in the following century.

The Assembly also created local governing bodies (that would become counties) and, in 1634, they adapted the English county court system to more effectively and locally administer law, which evolved into a major feature of the American jurisprudence structure. In addition, the concept of geographical legislative representation also appeared as the colonial government matured, for “Here was a custom created by local magistrates aiming to control local affairs that fostered a later American idea of the representative as a person whose personal obligation lay with the voters of the district. Such an accidental development diverged from the seventeenth century English understanding”.

Charles I finally reaffirmed the Assembly in 1639, which legitimated and began the ascendancy of an elected representative legislative body that would breed a major feature of our own new constitution almost fifteen decades later. Also, by 1639, Virginia-born councillors had also exerted their influence to oust an unpopular governor, which “opened the door to the rise of the colony’s ruling classes…Their achievements typified the emergence of a native ruling class that in some ways resembled England’s.”

The newly minted crown province or dominion continued to expand and develop. Within a generation, though, its social structure began to change into a more highly stratified class system. Some colonists found that it offered opportunities for economic and class betterment that were unavailable to them in England and furthered the new arrangement, but others found it too similar to the one they had escaped.

This is the fourth of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 3

2008-09-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

Jamestown’s Historical Context

Jamestown is better understood in the context of what was happening in England and the entire Atlantic community during its planning, establishment and existence, and what we are learning about the environment in the then New World and its native communities and societies.

English history at the close of the 16th and in the 17th centuries was complex. It was the Era of Religious Discord and economic times were difficult. The English economy was depressed by major agricultural changes, as the new wool-growing practices of “enclosures” by the great landowners drove thousands of small farmers and their families and laborers from rural land tenancy into urban poverty and starvation, plus increased crime and a surplus and overcrowded population, which doubled (from 2.3 to 4.8 million) between 1520 and 1630.

England was also suffering from the lingering effects of the extended series of wars for religious supremacy with Spain, which ended only after “the pacifically inclined James VI of Scotland” succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. The nation had been nearly bankrupted and Spain was.

The desperate societal conditions drove more than a few to risk health and life to seek any hopeful prospect of fleeing the economic deprivations and dislocations, oppressive class stratification, urban distress, religious turmoil and tedious years of war. Determined promoters and advocates for English colonization and global trade, especially cleric and scholar Richard Hakluyt, inspired the mercantile or entrepreneurial class to search for new economic opportunities outside of England, which included 16th century trading ventures sent to Muscovy (Russia), the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) and newly named Virginia in the New World (Roanoke), and, at the opening of the 17th, another to East India (India, Malaya and the East Indies).

The entrepreneurs who organized and financed those venture companies saw profit opportunities in solving the country’s economic problems but received little or no support from either Elizabeth’s or James’s virtually insolvent crown treasuries. The latter also distanced himself from the Virginia venture because he did not want to risk jeopardizing his recently concluded a peace agreement with Spain by openly sponsoring a settlement in what the Spanish claimed as their territory by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

Within three years of his coronation, though, he decided to generate new income for his depleted coffers by chartering a new private trading monopoly in the New World, the Virginia Company, to exploit the opportunities that its proponents were seeking. The new venture was also given a religious objective: to plant the Protestant Anglican religion in the New World and proselytize the indigenous people for Christianity. Hakluyt and other investors saw this as a strategy to help thwart Spanish and French expansion of Roman Catholicism in North America and included it in the Virginia Company’s patent.

Its organizers had learned from Hakluyt, plus reports from over a century of explorers’ and English fishermen’s experiences, English Caribbean ventures and the attempted Roanoke colonization in the late 1580s, that the mid-Atlantic New World promised astonishing new resources. However, one important eyewitness told them that precious jewels and gold probably did not abound there from what the indigenous people displayed, unlike what the Spanish had found in Mexico and South America.

Nevertheless, they needed to entice and recruit investors, soldiers and explorers to see what could be found to exploit the resources, generate new commerce and profits and open a new sea route to the trading riches of the East Indies and Asia. Despite the lack of empirical evidence, stories of the promise of Virginia gold were widely circulated, enough so as to have become legend, which was extended to the goals that were set for the Company’s privately backed expedition.

The Virginia Company raised the investment capital to undertake its trading mission from “adventurers,” ranging from trade and artisan guilds and other London organizations to individuals – including a diversity that included gentry and wealthy merchants plus carpenters and other ordinary citizens – and ran a public lottery. This private capital was Jamestown’s sole funding for its first seventeen years’ existence. It took about ten years to transform it from a trading outpost into a colony, when it finally began to develop its economic viability from a burgeoning demand for a new Virginia blend of tobacco.

This transformation came at a horrifying cost in colonists’ lives that is all too well known and remembered. However, according to historian Edmund S. Morgan, “Because of the chances for such profits, Jamestown in the last years of the Virginia Company, while a charnel house, was also the first American boom town.”

This is the third of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning; Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 2

2008-09-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

In the Shadows of American History

We must also realize why Jamestown disappeared from our national consciousness and into the shadows of our history. To paraphrase another observer, most 19th and 20th century chroniclers of early American colonial history treated Jamestown as almost a side issue. They attached no long-term importance to it, but saw it only as a trivia “first” and not essential to the “creation of the American nation” and its culture. To this must be added, more significantly, they failed to look at what it has really meant for subsequent generations of Americans, including our own.

He also said, “This dismissive treatment of Jamestown has a long record, and one not helped by the veterans of the colony itself, most importantly John Smith. Smith is generally recognized as the most important influence on the earliest years of Jamestown, for reasons we…have all heard many times. He also, however, was the earliest chronicler and for an important moment, the sole chronicler of what happened those first few years. Therefore, [much of] what we know of early Jamestown and its obstacles and internal strife is seen through the eyes of Smith, who we now better understand was perhaps not the most objective observer. In his own fury and self-protection after being replaced as leader of the colony, Smith painted the expedition as one bungled by fortune seekers often unable or unwilling to help themselves and saved only by his own disciplined leadership and resourcefulness.

“For decades, and partly because of the [propaganda] of men like Smith, the Jamestown adventure was seen as a kind of get rich scheme – colonization for all the wrong reasons. This view held that Jamestown and its participants had only themselves to blame for the difficulties they encountered”.

“The Pilgrim story,” Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman adds, “took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Scarlet Letter’), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

“This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.”

However, their motivations and examples of determination are what have been driving our nation’s development ever since, and better reflect who we are today. The innovative tenets that were conceived at Jamestown are equally significant as the desire for freedom from religious intolerance that took the Mayflower passengers to Plymouth or inspired their Mayflower Compact.

While many recent books report on research into newly discovered archives and relics, Professor J. Frederick Fausz laments that too many historians continue to repeat factual errors and debunked legends about Jamestown, and their continuing “reliance on and reprinting of old, obsolete books that are readable but not reliable…Why does the general public continue to embrace such flawed, dated information when it would be unthinkable to rely on medical advice from the 1920s?” Few of those venerable sources relate the whole cloth of Jamestown and its far-reaching effect on our nation’s foundation and emergence.

That Jamestown was abandoned and disappeared in the 18th century was for a long time unfortunate for the historical understanding of all of the origins of our nation. That it was is now also fortunate, because its preserved artifacts are now giving us new facts and proof of its settlers’ determination to succeed. Archaeologist William Kelso’s recent discoveries at that site of the first James Fort and better, modern methods of research into the situation, condition and environment of the settlement and its region, as are being used by him, Fausz, Kupperman, James Horn, Seth Mallios and others, are forcing “a few historians to re-examine what they thought they knew about Jamestown’s earliest years, and reconsider what really was happening there in the larger context of our colonial history”.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard tells us, “What Mr. Kelso and his team have found is rewriting the history that began with the 104 men and boys who landed on this swampy bit of land on May 14, 1607. Historians have dismissed the colonists as inept, lazy, feckless, or unprepared. But they hung on by the skin of their teeth, until the European consumer craze for tobacco threw them an economic lifeline. The new archaeological finds have begun to reveal how they weathered those first hard years and decades.

“But the artifacts, the graves of settlers, and even the discarded oyster shells that have emerged have done more than begin to recast the narrative. Specialists in 17th-century material culture and environmental scientists who study the Chesapeake Bay have been reaping the benefits of Mr. Kelso's work. Their analyses, in turn, have provided new fodder for historians of the wider Atlantic world”.

These analyses and interpretations have begun to dispel many myths, such as that of Jamestown’s lazy and self-indulgent “gentlemen” playing in the settlement’s streets and romantic legends about precocious Powhatan princesses. They belie the long and widely held popular assumptions that Jamestown was merely an historical footnote and unmitigated disaster; they also put a new light on the native Algonquians’ culture and mores and offer sound reasons for their unexpected hostility when the English landed.

This is the second of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Beyond Its Beginning: Our Legacies and Heritage from Jamestown - Part 1

2008-09-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

(This the first of nine parts)

Jamestown’s Meaning

Now that Jamestown’s Quatercentenary is history, let’s explore how the first permanent English settlement in America contributed to our national heritage. The past three years brought us a spate of new books and articles that not only reacquaint us with the mid-May 1607 landing and the tribulations of the first permanent English settlement in America, but also offer new evidence of the determination of those settlers to succeed.

Most of these historians’ and popular accounts have told us only the beginning of its story; there has been little mention that it was where some of our nation’s fundamental rights and constitutional principles were conceived and how those early colonists’ consequential actions helped to shape its development, economy and culture. Those rights and principles were nurtured during Jamestown’s nine decades to become among the key beliefs and values on which our nation was founded and has flourished. They remain among our most cherished ideals and ideologies, but how they were established has been generally overlooked.

Understandably, the essays, articles, books and television programs that commemorated Jamestown’s 400th anniversary focused the colony’s beginning years. Some reported on new evidence of the settlers’ lives, diets, attitudes, habits and possessions from the treasure trove of 17th century artifacts that are being unearthed from the archaeological digs of the first James Fort and nearby English and Algonquian settlements. Others described and expanded on American Indians’ customs, practices, polities and mores and their interactions with and among English and Europeans. More has become known about how they, Europeans and Africans also contributed to our nation’s initial history.

Jamestown’s founding, however, has a much deeper meaning than merely being one of our national origins. It was the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities to innovate many profound social, political, and economic tenets that have come down to us through our history. Their lasting effect is what has differentiated Jamestown from other preceding or contemporary English and European settlements in America. It is also where significant ecological impacts were introduced from the British Isles and Europe and the germs of our nation’s most heinous social maladies were incubated, such as institutionalized chattel slavery and the devastation of American Indian life and customs.

Looking Beyond the Beginning

While historians have thoroughly chronicled Jamestown’s first seventeen years, most of them have given us only a glimpse of what was accomplished there. To fully understand that deeper meaning, we need to look beyond that beginning, for, as Professor Warren Billings argues, “…the significance of Jamestown lies beyond [those years]. To be sure, things such as the start of the tobacco economy, the founding of the General Assembly, and the transformation of the colony from a [trading and] military outpost to an agricultural settlement trace their origins to that period, [but] it was in the decades after 1624 that the social, political, and economic implications of those developments played out, and Virginia became a place quite unlike anything the [colony’s] backers envisioned, even in their wildest dreams.” With few exceptions, such as Billings, those chroniclers have almost ignored the extraordinary consequences that the Jamestown settlers fostered for America’s economic and political evolution.

When we look over its nine decades, we realize Jamestown’s crucial place in our history, its contributions to our constitutional republic and how major threads of our heritage were first spun there to be woven into our national fabric. As Professor Jack P. Greene observed, “No longer can scholars think of colonial [history] as something exclusively prenational. Rather historians must recognize that this process has been fundamental to…state building and that it continued long after the initial formation of national states”.

Novel concepts for independence, private property, self-governance and empowerment were devised and established at Jamestown during nearly seventy years of benign neglect of Virginia by England’s rulers, who were focused on their own persistent domestic crises for much of the 17th century. Those concepts’ development was merely slowed by the constraints of new royal policies imposed near the end of that century. They would mature over the following decades to entwine with complementing ideals and visions from New England and other colonies to become embodied in our Constitution.

Jamestown’s Most Important Lesson

So, of what long-term importance is Jamestown as a transformational event in our nation’s history? What legacies has it left us? Why should we care about it, 400-plus years later?

By 1620, or within thirteen years of their landing, Jamestown’s founders had launched several of our most valued rights and privileges. Students learn that it was the site of our first elected representative legislature and beginning of our self-rule, where the free enterprise system became the form of our American economy and English was established as the common language of the new American nation.

However, we should also teach them that it is where those early settlers also confirmed the common citizen’s right to own private property (and its personal importance to us – who are homeowners, for example – since then and today), instigated our real estate industry, validated the principle of common law as the foundation of our own legal system, established civilian control of the military, and fostered new freedoms from English and European customs and traditions that had bound many generations to their ancestors’ trades, classes and economic conditions. Those rights and privileges took root and began to blossom at Jamestown as it established itself and served as Virginia’s colonial capital for almost a century.

We should also instruct that, over its ninety-plus years, they were complemented with additional tenets and principles and the first steps toward our nation's westward expansion, which the immediate descendants of early Jamestown settlers left to us as keystones of our national heritage. Jamestown’s most important lesson is how and why a new people – Americans – learned to govern themselves and came to determine their destiny. The learning of that lesson was the creation and continued enjoyment of our Constitution.

This the first of nine parts
Copyright 2008

Bermuda prepares for its 400th anniversary

2008-09-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

From the Bermuda Sun
September 19, 2008

A yearlong celebration of Bermuda and its people
Island prepares for its 400th anniversary
An early warning to all islanders: 2009 is going to be off the hook for parties, fun and celebration.

By Helen Jardine

After all, it's not every day Bermuda gets to celebrate its 400th birthday.

To celebrate Bermuda's quad-centennial, The Bermuda 2009 Steering Committee has organized a whole calendar of events - from January to December - that celebrate who we are as a nation and how far we have come.

Chairman of the committee Conchita Ming said she "is thrilled" to be involved with such a historic event.

"It's going to be a busy year," she said. "It is really about celebrating the resilience of Bermuda. We've been able to overcome many adversities and challenges considering we are such an isolated island. For example, we have attempted to be involved in several industries that didn't work for us. We tried tobacco farming and that didn't work. Even recently we were forced to move from tourism to exempt companies. We've met the challenge and that's what we want to look at throughout 2009."

One of the things Ms Ming said she is looking forward to the most next year is their 'Walk Through History' self-guided tour, when 23 plaques will be displayed throughout the city of Hamilton to mark historic landmarks or cultural areas.

"At the corner of Victoria Street and Court Street we are going to put up a plaque to depict an area where many of the island's black doctors used to work," she said. "It's important to reflect on the past. We can use the past as a tool to look forward."

She also said that, despite our size, it is important to recognize the kind of influence Bermuda has had on the larger world.

"The Sea Venture was on its way to Virginia when it was ship-wrecked in Bermuda," she explained. "A year later they built the Deliverance and the Patience out of parts of the Sea Venture and eventually made their way to Jamestown. When they arrived, only 60 out of the 500 people that had landed in Virginia the year prior had survived. The others had all starved to death. Had those from the Deliverance and The Patience not arrived when they did and fed them, that little group would have died off completely we may have a very different United States."

Jamestown celebrated their 400th anniversary last February and Ms Ming was there.

"There were several artifacts that had come from Bermuda in some of the Jamestown exhibits," she said. "Such as cahow bones and turtle shells."

Museums in Jamestown will be sending those articles back to Bermuda to be exhibited in October.

"I'm learning so much just being involved in the committee," Ms Ming said.

One thing she has discovered is that the wreck of the Sea Venture lies only 4-500 yards off Gates' Bay (more commonly known as St. Catherine's beach).

The committee are hoping to install a bronze plaque at the wreck site to commemorate the Sea Venture.

However, there is contention as to when the anniversary should be celebrated.

"Some will say we should celebrate this in 2012 as that is when we became an official colony," Ms Ming said. "But we've had people living here continuously since the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 and that is what we are celebrating - Bermuda and its people."

Kick-off celebrations begin January 3.

"Our launch party is going to be amazing," Ms Ming said. "There will be stilt-walking, fire performances, aerial performances, and Japanese drummers."

Events throughout the year include a re-enactment of the wreck of the Sea Venture, a Titanic exhibit, fish chowder competitions, Tall Ships 2009 and a Portuguese Festival.

Most events will be free.

The committee is also hoping to have a Royal visit sometime next year.

Other birthday milestones in 2009 include the 200th anniversary of Dockyard and the 50th anniversary of the Theatre Boycott.

For more information or to find out how you can be involved in the festivities go to www.bermuda2009.bm.

University of Virginia accepts 300,000 pieces of Flowerdew farm history

2008-09-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

From the Charlottesville Daily Progress
By Aaron Lee

Published: September 8, 2008

Roughly 300,000 artifacts that shed light on centuries of history — including the early English settlement of North America — have been donated to the University of Virginia. The artifacts come from a farm known as Flowerdew Hundred on the south side of the James River between Hopewell and Jamestown. It was once the site of Native American villages, a fortified frontier settlement, a thriving plantation and a major Civil War encampment.

“It is one of the most significant and comprehensive collections on Virginia history,” said Hoke Perkins, director of UVa’s Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture. The late David and Mary Harrison, for whom the institute is named, purchased Flowerdew in 1967. The donated collection of artifacts comes from their children.

“Our father was determined that the important material discovered at Flowerdew would live on, and we feel like the university will prove to be a wonderful home for the collection,” said Mary Harrison Keevil, Harrison’s daughter.

UVa alumnus David Harrison, a lawyer and investment banker, was one of the university’s most generous benefactors. The field at Scott Stadium is named in his honor. He died in 2002; Mary died in 1990. Artifacts unearthed during decades of excavation at Flowerdew Hundred include stone tools estimated to be 10,000 years old.

Flowerdew became an English settlement in 1619, when Sir George Yeardley was granted 1,000 acres that he named in honor of his wife, Temperance Flowerdew. It later became the site of America’s first windmill.

During the Civil War, Union troops camped at Flowerdew for three days before the Battle of
Petersburg.

Prior to the donation of the artifact collection, fewer than 100 artifacts from the farm had been on loan to the Harrison Institute since 2004. Once the recently donated collection is catalogued it will be available to researchers and enhance the collection already on display to the public, said Perkins, director of the Harrison Institute.

The donation will also be incorporated into online research resources, Charlotte Morford, UVa Library director for communications, said. Further down the road, Perkins said, the institute would like to explore using the Flowerdew finds in collaboration with archeological collections at other cultural institutes in Virginia.

Paces Paines; Where It Was and What's Doing There

2008-08-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

Richard Pace was an ancient planter known in Jamestown annals as having warned of the devastating Indian raids of March 22, 1622. Early that morning, the Powhatans and their allies mounted a well-planned and coordinated surprise attack throughout the colony to drive the English from their ancestral homelands, which shattered a tenuous eight-year peace and left over a quarter of the settlers dead. The score of outlying plantations were decimated, but Pace’s alert spared Jamestown itself. The effect of the assault on the colony was not unlike that of the terrorists’ plane crashes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon almost four centuries later.

Chanco, an Indian Christian convert, informed Richard of the planned attack during the night before. After preparing the defense of his plantation, "Paces Paines" (on the south side of the James River), he then rowed his boat two or three miles across the river to Jamestown with his wife, Isabella (also an ancient planter in her own right), son George and Chanco, where he delivered his pre-dawn warning.

Richard and Isabella Pace had patented 200 acres in 1620 (100 acres each, as ancient planters) and developed Paces Paines as a small, fortified settlement. He died c. 1623-4 and the plantation was acquired from her and her son by William Swann in 1635. Today, it’s “a part of the tracts of land known as Swann’s Point and Mount Pleasant, which boast a rich architectural history.”

Mount Pleasant was further developed in the 17th and 18th centuries and has been the focus of a restoration project by its current owners. They have had the counsel of Nick Luccketti, one of the original members of the Jamestown Rediscovery team and now a Williamsburg-based forensic archaeologist who runs the James River Institute For Archeology. Recent archaeological testing under Luccketti’s direction has the located the likely location of Paces Paines in a field northeast of the main house.

According to the Mount Pleasant Restoration website (click on the headline of this post), “Attributed to Paces Paines were four households, all of which were headed by ancient planters. They included John Proctor and his wife, Alice, and their three servants; Phettiplace Close and Daniel Wattkins and their two servants; Thomas and Elizabeth Gates and William Bedford; and Francis Chapman. The Proctors were credited with two houses and the members of their household were very well armed.”

The website has an extensive and detailed discussion of the background, status, progress and plans for the restoration, together with maps and photographs of this significant early American colonial landmark. Be prepared to spend some time at this interesting site.

The website also says, “The archaeological survey of Mount Pleasant has discovered one of the four Paces Paines’ sites in the downriver or east field. The artifacts collected from the site are the same types that have been excavated at Martin’s Hundred including clay tobacco pipe bowls (one with markings identical to a pipe from Wolstenholme Town), fragments of Rhenish stoneware Bartmann or “bearded man” jugs, Iberian costrel sherds, and pieces of Staffordshire butterpot.”

The context for Paces Paines’ history is also found on the research tab on the website at “Historical Background of the Mount Pleasant-Swann’s Point Tract, Surry County, Virginia,” by noted Jamestown historian, Mary W. McCartney, which also can be linked through the headline.

Welcome to Jimson Harvest

2008-08-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Jamestown's Quatercentenary is history; we can reflect on the extraordinary discoveries that Bill Kelso and his crew have made on the island and the many books and articles that commemorated it. Nevertheless, we still lack a national awareness of the colony's most important heritage and legacies.

Almost all recent historians’ and popular accounts have focused solely on its background, founding and early years. Some have reported the new evidence of its settlers’ lives, diets, attitudes, habits and possessions from the treasure trove of 17th century artifacts that are being unearthed from the archaeological digs of the first James Fort and nearby English and Algonquian settlements. Others have described what is also being learned about the influence, roles and contributions of Europeans and Africans.

Jamestown's founding has a much deeper meaning than merely being one of our national origins. It was the seminal incident that introduced the opportunities to innovate many profound social, political, and economic tenets and constitutional principles that have come down to us through our history. Their lasting effect is what has differentiated Jamestown from other preceding or contemporary English and European settlements in America.

The recent histories have thoroughly chronicled Jamestown's first seventeen years, but, with few exceptions, given us only a glimpse of what was accomplished there. Professor Warren Billings argues, "...the significance of Jamestown lies beyond [those years, when] Virginia became a place quite unlike anything [its founders] envisioned, even in their wildest dreams."

When we look across its nine decades, we realize Jamestown's crucial place in our history, its contributions to our constitutional republic and how major threads of our heritage were first spun there to be woven into our national fabric.

Jimson Harvest aims to provide a forum for discussion of Jamestown's legacies and influence on our heritage and history.