Road trip day four, part 1 — Jamestown

 Wednesday morning.  Cold and wet, but at least it’s not raining anymore.   I was so cold I wound up buying a souvenir sweatshirt .

Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America, founded in 1607. It was the capital of the Virginia colony for most of the 17th century.  Later the town was plowed under, became part of a plantation. And now the site has become an archeological dig.

There are two museums.  Our first stop was at Jamestown Settlement. There’s a gallery than explains the three cultures that came together to form the colony — the local Native Americans, the English colonists, and the Africans, mostly brought here as slaves.

Jamestown was primarily a profit center for the Virginia Company, but also served as a military outpost against Spanish interests in the New World.

Next up was a recreated Powhatan village.

It was warm and cozy inside the hut.

Then we walked down to the pier, where we visited replicas of the Godspeed and the Discovery, two of the three ships that brought colonists to Jamestown. The Susan Constant is currently in Mystic, CT — there’s a shipbuilding facility there, so I think it’s being refurbished.

This boat is on loan from the Plymouth museum.

The last area is a replication of the fort.

This was the governor’s house.

Just down the road is the actual Jamestown site, Historic Janestowne.  A portion of the site is under the control of the National Park Service, but the majority of the site is controlled by Preservation Virginia.  There are monuments and mock ups, and it’s also a working archeological dig.  There’s also an archeological museum on site.

A monument.

The entrance to the dig site.

The church — also the site of the first General Assembly.

Pocahontas

Inside  the church

John Smith

An archeological treasure — once the well ran dry they’d use it as a garbage dump.

Inside the museum.

Our last stop was the glasshouse.  You can see the ruins of the glasshouse built in 1608, watch some glass blowers at their craft, and buy hand-blown glass.  I bought a vase and a paperweight.  Both and wrapped for transport, I’ll post photos when I get home.

I’ve got paperweights from 1974, 1996 and 2012, and now one marked “2025” will join the collection.

Seen on Colonial Parkway

Doubled back to the Jamestown Settlement for lunch at the cafe — sandwiches, burgers, pizza, etc.

Then back to Williamsburg.

One of the joys of staying in a tavern room is that our window face Duke of Gloucester Street. We were just hanging out when I heard it — the fife and drum corps marched past our windows.