Jamestown Settlement and Yorktown, both in Virginia and both part of crucial early moments in the commonwealth’s history, make for strange but fascinating bedfellows. The first is the place England made its initial go in the New World, despite starvation and an understandably violent pushback from native Americans beginning in 1607. The second is the place upstart Americans sent the British scrambling home in 1781.
Neither place is the elegant theme park that is Colonial Williamsburg, though spending a day there too while in the neighborhood is as easy as buying another ticket. Yet both Jamestown and Yorktown have been developed to serve as unofficial junior editions of the same kind of experience. Both can be visited in a single day with a single combination ticket. By the end of that day, you’ll have not only seen quite a few people doing odd jobs in period costumes but learned more about the true “birth of a nation” than you ever picked up in high school.
The Jamestown Settlement wasn’t built near or around the James River that leads inland from the Atlantic via Chesapeake Bay – it was built ON it. You can see replicas of the original ships from the water if you arrive by the Scotland-Jamestown ferry, which is almost a “pre-show” in the Disney World sense of the term. You might not climb out of your car on the ferry, but do open all the windows. You feel the sun on your arms and the breeze on your face, and understand a little better what it must have felt like to first lay eyes on the green “virgin” land that gave the future commonwealth its name.
The Yorktown museum, like the one that’s at Jamestown Settlement, does acknowledge there were Americans on this land before these future Americans stepped off their ships from England. Native Americans, known then as Indians, had been here for thousands of years. They’d learned to survive off the land by living close to the land, with the land, at peace with the land. We would all come to admire how well they did that. With the arrival of the English, those days came to an end.
Several exhibits at the Yorktown museum spotlight another group of newcomers. In 1619, just a dozen years after the English arrival at Jamestown, about 20 kidnapped African slaves were brought ashore in Virginia. These were stolen from a Portuguese slave ship, almost as an afterthought. But no matter. Before long, the wealth of Virginia as an English colony depended on the kidnapping, buying and selling of human beings.
Like Yorktown, the ticketed destination called the Jamestown Settlement is an indoor/outdoor affair. There is a large and intriguing museum that’s inside, and the bulk of your time may well be spent there. As at Yorktown, there’s an impressive film to get you situated in place and especially time, plus three major outdoor sets – a Powhatan village, the sailing ships you spotted from the ferry, and Jamestown Fort. By the time you tour through the fort, you’ll know well just how regular the Indian attacks had been in the early years of Jamestown.
Lack of food was an even larger concern. The ships brought provisions for the voyage from England, of course, avoiding the rough north Atlantic by sailing south along Africa to the Caribbean. It was a route the English were coming to know well, and would know even better once sugar was king, rum was the favored byproduct and African slaves were the business that funded virtually all others. Then… north along Spanish Florida until the Chesapeake promised by earlier charts finally appeared.
Even though the Jamestown ships carried provisions to start building a new paradise, those ran out, long before anybody with a British accent mastered the beginnings of local agriculture. There was even the Starving Time, when many Englishman threw themselves on the mercy of local tribes, begging on the mud streets of their villages. Some of those seem to have picked up growing and cooking tips, right along with handouts that were quite generous, all things considered.
For many visitors, the highlight of a few hours at Jamestown will be the ships. You get to stroll out on the dock and even walk the gangplank to go onboard. There you are greeted by young sailors in period costume who know what each piece of equipment does and can demonstrate how to use it. You can climb down into the cargo hold if you like, since cargo was what the ships were actually built to carry. Sailors, and even worse settlers, had to simply stake out a place to sleep.
Taken together, the pieces and people that make up Jamestown Settlement will leave a dramatic impression, something you’ve now seen, heard and touched that, before visiting, you’d merely read about in history books.
Yorktown and its battle that ended the Revolutionary War was something of a letdown in military history terms, though probably what more commanders ought to do. The battle in 1781 involved a British general named Cornwallis who was driving his Redcoat armies toward the water to meet up with a British fleet. Maybe they could stand and fight against the rebels there, or maybe they’d be forced onto ships for a retreat. Either way, they wouldn’t be slaughtered by the Americans – who’d come a long way from the rednecks- with-rifles of their revolution’s first years.
What happened at Yorktown was quite different. Another fleet sent by the French – who’d tossed lifesavers to the Americans several times already – arrived in time to turn the British ships away. Cornwallis was left, literally, high and dry, pinned against the James River and surrounded by George Washington’s troops. After five years of atrocities (that was long before the Geneva Convention) and pitched battles, those troops were more than ready to cause some serious bloodshed. Instead, Cornwallis saw the hopeless situation his armies were in and surrendered to Washington. The American Revolution, for all the later negotiations that would lead to the Treaty of Paris, ended in Yorktown on that day.
The American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, it turns out, is separate from the site of the battle itself – that requires a separate ticket from somebody else and mostly involves driving around. The museum, though, is a terrific affair staged by the same foundation that’s behind Jamestown Settlement. Thus, the easy combo tickets. There’s a large indoor museum of galleries about the entire conflict to win independence, not just a single battle in one original British colony.
It’s a refresher course in U.S. history that’s seldom seemed more lively, or more needed, complete with printed quotes from people large and small who played a role. Considerable attention is paid to the contributions of native Americans, enslaved Africans and women of many races, birthplaces and creeds, an overdue change from the white-male-centric narrative of not-lamented past.
As at Jamestown, some of the most fun at the Yorktown Museum is found outdoors. There is an evocative encampment of the Continental Army (where the occasional patriot demonstrates loading and firing a musket – happily without a minie ball). And there’s a period farm with women doing various period tasks. It’s eye-opening to see just how basic staying alive could still be, nearly 175 years after the British first pulled their three ships into what would become Jamestown.
