Jamestowne

Today, it was to be Jamestowne and Yorktown, but that would be biting off more than we could do. So we spent most of the day exploring Jamestown Settlement - a rich recreation of an English fort, a Native American village, and the ships used to sail to the new world. We then explored the National Historic Park site at Historic Jamestowne. This is the suspected site of the actual fort and settler's buildings as well as the early capital of the Virginia Colony. We had a long discussion with one of the Archeologists charged with uncovering the old site. It has proven very difficult since part of the site was destroyed during construction of Confederate civil war battlements.

One of the small ships that frequented early Jamestowne Colony.


Scenes from within the reconstruction fort. This reconstruction simulates life around the time period of early Jamestowne.

This is the suspected location of the actual first fort, based on extensive archeological investigations. The process is long and arduous and fraught with dead ends. First the Confederate soldiers stripped the site to provide fill for battlements. This destroyed the integrity of any artifacts. Then there was an old church built nearby and many bodies are buried here. Are they settlers, or later period bodies? Through this long process, enough information will emerge to perhaps be able to reconstruct much of the actual first settlement. Not all - for river erosion has removed a lot of the site, but certainly parts of it.