Jamestowne (yes with an "e")

After visiting Yorktown Battlefield Amy and I went to Historic Jamestowne, and the other end of the Colonial National History Park (we'd visited the Glasshouse the day before).  As mentioned previously, it was a fee free weekend, so we didn't have to pay the regular entrance fee.  This was quite nice, but it also meant a very full parking lot.  We saw at least one car illegally parked that had been ticketed, and we ourselves parked in the RV lot.

There was quite a bit to Jamestowne, perhaps more than I expected.  I didn't take pictures inside the Visitor Center since that was all something that we'd seen last year, so I didn't think about going through it or documenting it this time around.  Thankfully it was a beautiful day to walk around outside and see things.  There was an interesting mixture of historic buildings and new buildings.

There was a very large monument that was quite hard to miss, I don't remember reading about it specifically, but I'm sure it was likely built around the 300th anniversary, when several other things were built.

The church was rebuilt in the early 1900s (around the 300th anniversary) and sits right next to where the reconstructed fort stands.

Of course there was a statue of Pocahontas, ;-).  Of course it was much better than the crazy Disney "history" that most kids are familiar with.

 I really enjoyed walking around the fort and the entire area actually.  Amy is quite familiar with all of this and used to seeing things from the 1600s and 1700s, but I'm not quite accustomed to it.  I grew up in California, so while there was some old Spanish History, much stuff was from the 1800s and later.  I traveled around the country, but again, most things were from the 1800s and later, or perhaps the later part of the 1700s (e.g. the settlement of Kentucky and Cincinnati).

I can't believe it, but I just realized that I didn't take any pictures showing the whole fort.  :(  Thankfully the image above does show you what the fort looks like.  Several places inside had informative signs next to stretches of dirt.  Apparently since there isn't enough money to enclose excavated areas the researchers dig up areas, study the contents, make cool looking signs, and bury everything back up.  This meant that there wasn't much to see inside the fort, but I can understand that they want to protect things.  And the issue is that people stayed in the area for many years, continuing to build things until the capitol moved to Williamsburg.

These next couple pictures show one of the excavation areas that lies underneath where one of the walls of the fort was located.  Obviously to continue the excavation they had to remove the fort walls, which detracts somewhat from that presentation, but allows the researchers to explore more of the history.  By the time this building was constructed the original fort was long gone--but people want to see the walls of the original fort since that is the period people find most interesting.  In fact if I remember correctly the excavation concerns a Civil War fort that was constructed long after all of the original structures (except for the church bell tower) were long gone:

The fort looked quite old, but the signs were very new and most of them had QR codes on them.  We were too busy walking around, so I didn't take the time to scan any of them, but I figure that I should be able to scan the pictures later if I want to see what they link to.

Just outside the fort walls, towards the area that became the later settlement (where more houses were constructed once the settlement was well established) was a partial reconstruction of a barracks building.

After looking at this and a couple other areas we headed over to the Archaearium, a museum built over the ruins of the statehouse.  It was really fascinating to look at the artifacts, and even look down to where some of the exposed foundations were preserved under the building.  As I mentioned previously we actually had to leave while we were only partway through the Archaearium.  Staff told us that the property was in lockdown mode and we had to go back to the visitor's center.

You can see all of the pictures (those above and more!) that I took at Jamestowne in a Picasa album here:


~Matt