Published: February 17, 2007 09:31 pm      

Historic Jamestowne offers glimpse of past

EDMOND — Four hundred candles make a mighty blaze — only fitting for a birthday celebration for the founding settlement of our country. Are there older cities? Yes, for example, St. Augustine, Fla., and Santa Fe, N.M., were both settled earlier. But the taproot of our society is English and the 104 men who sailed into Chesapeake Bay and landed on the banks of the James River in 1607 established the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

That wasn’t really their intent. It was a business venture. The men were sponsored by the Virginia Company of London whose investors hoped to reap a profit from the natural resources of the area.

They were hoping to find gold. Instead, they found brackish water, an unfamiliar climate, lack of food and an iffy relationship with the American Indians. It would take six hard years before the adventurers would find gold in the form of a broad-leafed plant — tobacco — and several more years before the colony achieved relative stability.

The marriage of Pocahontas, daughter of tribal leader Powhatan, to John Rolfe, who is given credit for growing and sending the first samples of tobacco to England, brought an era of relative peace to the settlement, which served as the capitol of the Virginia Colony until 1699.

Years of planning have gone into preparing an outstanding experience for visitors coming to Jamestown this year. When I visited in 2005, many elements already were in place.

It’s initially confusing to find there are two main Jamestown venues — Historic Jamestowne, which is a National Park Service/Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities site and Jamestown Settlement, a living history museum. My time was limited and I was looking for the “real thing” so I chose Historic Jamestowne and planned to skip Jamestown Settlement.

I actually wound up visiting both and here’s my best advice — start with Jamestown Settlement. With an introductory film, a comprehensive museum and outdoor re-creations, this place is a fabulous example of historic interpretation based on the latest scholarship available. The background I learned there would have made my Historic Jamestowne experience much richer.

Outdoor exhibits include a Powhatan Indian Village, James Fort, the riverfront discovery area and the replica ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. In each area, interpreters in period dress re-create daily life in Jamestown’s early years. I watched men working in the garden, talked to a sail maker, visited with ship builders and boarded the ships, marveling at how anything as tiny as the Discovery could have made the four-and-a-half months voyage across the ocean.

Since 2005, extensive indoor museum exhibits have been added and both the re-created Powhatan Indian Village and Fort have been modified based on recent discoveries. Two of the ships have been replaced with more accurate replicas based on information on documented cargo capacities and current maritime research. The third ship, the Susan Constant, was built more recently and did not need to be replaced.

Inside the fort, the Anglican church, the cape merchant’s office, the governor’s house and other buildings house various activities of the early colony. As the original buildings would have been, these structures are built with wattle and daub — which is a matrix of branches or lath covered with a mixture of dirt and straw — with thatched roofs. Chickens scurried around my feet as I watched two women preparing loaves for the outdoor baking oven.

These exhibits make the minimal ruins left at the original site more understandable. When I visited, Historic Jamestowne was notable more for what was not there than what was. Nothing from the 17th century remains standing, except the remains of the church tower, which dates back to the mid-1600s.

The first church in Jamestown consisted of a ship sail hung between trees. The tower belongs to the fourth church on the site. The memorial church there today was built in 1907 by the Colonial Dames.

The most exciting things going on at Historic Jamestowne were archaeological. We watched workers with tiny trowels and brushes poring over minute bits of soil inside the perimeter of the fort.

We strolled by statues of John Smith and Pocahontas and bricks marking building foundations and took a drive around the island where a series of interpretive paintings point out spots where activities like brick making and potash production took place.

This week, a talk with Mike Litterst, public affairs officer, brought me up to date. “There’s a lot more here today than when you visited,” he told me. “We just opened the new Visitor Center in January. The 18,000-square-foot space features museum exhibits and an orientation program. We’ve built the Archaearium, a building dedicated to the archaeological excavations — how we found the fort and what we learned about the settlers. There are over 1,000 artifacts on display. We’ve also re-erected the fort palisade walls, making it a lot easier to visualize what was here. We’ve spent about $65 million in the last eight years. I hope you’ll come back and see what we’ve done.”

I hope so, too.

(Elaine Warner is an Edmond resident.)