The Jamestown Settlement Museum is a great place to take the family, but I'd long been wanting to visit Historic Jamestown, the actual site of that ill-fated colony.
After our visit at the living history center, we drove the two or three miles through swampland to the National Park Service site.
For me, it was absolutely fascinating:
These graves mark the Starving Time, the desperate winter of 1609-1610. When a load of new colonists landed in mid-August 1609, the situation was dire. They brought few provisions: their supply ships had run aground in Bermuda. Indians were besieging Jamestown. The colony's leader, Captain John Smith, left for England in October for treatment of a gunpowder burn. Food supplies were exhausted. The settlers feared to leave the fort to fish or hunt. By the spring, more than half the colony had perished from disease and famine. (exerpt from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)
In the 1950s, archaeologists located an early unmarked cemetery. It lay under the ruins of a statehouse that was built at Jamestown in the 1660s. Now called the Statehouse Complex Burial Ground, it holds victims of the Starving Time, as well as later graves up to the 1630s. (Image courtesy of: APVA Preservation Virginia/Historic Jamestowne)
I know. quite the yawner for a blog post, BUT- definitely one of the season's best for me.
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