SATURDAY JULY 3RD

With the top down and the GPS plugged in, it was off to Historic Jamestowne.

It was a gorgeous day out and the beauty of the drive surprised us. It wasn’t on a freeway but through a hardwood forest.



A little back story on Jamestowne, in case you forget what we learned back in grade school.

Jamestowne was the beginning of the America we know today. The colonists didn’t come because of religious persecution. They came for one reason only, money! A group of London investors funded the colony. 104 men and boys came to build a settlement and send the “riches” of the country back to England.

That was in 1607. Big problems off the bat. Got the crop in too late so not much to eat that winter. And of the 104 men, most were “gentlemen” and their menservants! Whoever picked this crew was an idiot. Most of these men didn't know which end of a shovel to even put in the ground. Add to that, Jamestowne was located on a marshy island with no fresh water. By the following spring dysentery, typhoid, malaria and accidents had claimed many of the settlers’ lives. Only 38 were left.

John Smith did make friends with the local Indian chief, who was the leader of around 14,000 Indians in Virginia, and they traded. By the way, despite what we may have learned about John Smith and Pocahontas in grade school, it isn’t true! She would only have been about 10 years old at the time. John Smith was known as a braggart and exaggerated things. He didn’t write about the Pocahontas story until he was back in London for years. Oh, and she wasn’t the only beautiful woman he wrote about in his travels to have saved him. He was a very good leader though.

In 1609 his bag of gunpowder that he carried exploded and he returned to London for treatment, never to return. The ship that took him had brought close to 500 settlers to Jamestowne. The man who replaced John Smith as leader was bad news. He committed atrocities on the locals and they responded by killing anyone that left the fort.

Spring of 1610 found only 60 of the 500 still alive!!! Many starved and there were reports of cannibalism.

The story gets better at this point. Spring also brought more settlers that had shipwrecked in Bermuda for the winter. (lucky for them) One of the settlers was John Rolfe, who eventually married Pocahontas and her dad (the chief) vowed to leave the English alone. John Rolfe arrived though with something special, Caribbean tobacco seeds! Jamestowne was on its way!

Now that I’ve bored you with the history lesson, here’s the actual site where it happened. There is a great deal of excavating going on at present because they didn’t find the fort walls until the late ‘90’s. After the settlement was abandoned, luckily it became a farm. So only the top 6 to 8 inches was ever disturbed.

The original fort would have looked like this.

The first buildings constructed would have been barracks or some type of shelter. They would have looked like this, and covered with a mud mixture which dried hard. And the roof would have been bundles of marsh grasses tied together.

They have a museum full of artifacts that have been found. Many of them were found in the two wells. Once a well went dry, or bad, they used it as a garbage dump. They threw in old armor, knives, garbage, you name it.





From Historic Jamestowne, we went to The Jamestown Settlement. It has a museum also, but it a living history museum of what life must have been like.







This building shows how later structures were built. They would cover all of this with mud. When it rained, all those bundles of marsh grass would swell up with water and make the roof waterproof.

These are the types of huts the local Indians lived in. They took green saplings and bent them, then covered them with mats of woven marsh grass. Our tour guide told us that these huts have withstood hurricanes! The mats needed replacing, but he structures stood.



Here’s what it looked like inside.


Okay, I think I’ve bored all of you enough for one day.

Enjoy your air conditioning, indoor plumbing, clean sheets and nearby grocery stores! And bug spray!