Williamsburg Again and Yorktown

Our vacation continued on Thursday, April 19th. After breakfast we headed back to Colonial Williamsburg. Our first activity was an audience with George Washington in 1775. The people in the audience played the part of the people of Williamsburg and he addressed us as a member of the House of Burgesses and delegate to the Continental Congress. The war hadn’t started yet so he wasn’t yet General Washington. He gave a great picture of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution and took questions without ever breaking character or forgetting his moment in time. I was very impressed. He kept everyone’s attention, even Maura's. She had been worried she might be bored. After the audience we spent the morning in Colonial Williamsburg visiting houses and shops. We had lunch at Chowning’s Tavern, which we enjoyed.

After lunch we went back to pick up the car at the Cedars and headed down the Colonial Parkway for Yorktown. It was a very pretty drive. It would have been nice to take it slowly and stop to enjoy the scenery but we were in a bit of a hurry because we needed some time to spend at Yorktown before everything there closed. We stopped at the Visitor Center to pick up Maura’s Junior Ranger book for Yorktown and then took a whirlwind tour of the battlefield. We didn’t really have enough time to explore but we did get to hit the highlights. The siege works were very impressive, particularly the remains of the British works which were repaired by the Confederate forces during the Civil War. Maura learned about the American victory at Yorktown which convinced the British to give up trying to compel the colonies to return to their allegiance and resulted, after long negotiations, in the recognition of American independence and peace between the United States and Great Britain. Maura got her paperwork in for her Junior Ranger badge just before they locked the doors. It was the second she earned on the trip and she was proud of it. Despite the rush we did get the chance to learn some interesting details. I hadn’t known that a German speaking regiment in the French Army had attacked a position held by Germans in the British service.

We drove through the town of Yorktown after our battlefield tour. We stopped for a short time at the monument commemorating the victory but nothing else in the town seemed to be open. There was much we might have seen had we been there earlier in the day. Yorktown is another place we will have to visit again if we ever make it back to that part of Virginia. Afterwards we headed back to Williamsburg for dinner and a night’s rest.

The next day was our last day in Virginia. We spent in the whole day in Colonial Williamsburg and there were many things there that we didn’t have enough time see. We had had tentative plans to visit Busch Gardens, which is nearby, but we convinced Maura to forego that part of our trip by promising a visit to an amusement park in New England over the summer. We started on the third day with another visit with a historical character. This time it was Patrick Henry, firebrand orator and first governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The man who played Patrick Henry had a very different style than the man who played George Washington just as Henry and Washington had vastly differing styles. He stayed in his character very well but didn’t stay in his time period, which I believe was 1778. He answered questions that were a bit anachronistic. I might have to read a biography of him. He was certainly a strong character and an important creator of public opinion in Virginia and throughout the Colonies in the time leading to independence. We all agreed that we preferred the audience with Washington however.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the Colonial Williamsburg. In the morning we explored the gardens of the governor’s palace, the gunsmiths and the print shop. We had lunch at the King’s Arms Tavern and we enjoyed it thoroughly. The taverns generally were less crowded at lunch time and we did not need reservations like we did in the evening. They might be busier during the high season. After lunch my parents left us to go visit some old friends who had moved to Virginia and lived an hour or so away from Williamsburg near Richmond. We went on exploring without them. We saw a working kitchen with a newly built bread oven, the courthouse, a blacksmith, and a book bindery. At the guardhouse Maura participated in the militia drill with a two smaller children. Sticks filled in for their weapons. They all had a bit of trouble telling right from left so they got posted to awkward squad.

We wanted to purchase some souvenirs so we walked to the Visitor Center to spend some time at the gift shop and bookstore. On the way we found one more of the highlights of Colonial Williamsburg, the Good Hope Plantation, which gives the visitor an idea of the environment in which most of the people of Virginia lived—on plantations in the backcountry. It had a slave cabin and a tobacco barn They raise hogs and chickens there the way they did in the 18th Century and smoke hams in their smokehouse. They also have a saw pit where they were preparing timbers for use in construction in Williamsburg. The town is as realistic as it can be but by itself it doesn’t give a very complete picture of colonial society in Virginia where the plantations were the source of the wealth that built the town and the home of most of the people, white and black.

We bought our souvenirs and headed back to the main part of Colonial Williamsburg. Maura chose a wooden hoop for the hoop and stick game she had learned on the Palace Green earlier in the day. She had fun with the game and wanted to bring it home. I bought a t-shirt, my usual souvenir. Jennifer brought home cookbooks so we could duplicate some of the food we had eaten in the taverns.

Our last activity in Williamsburg was a talk the Native American actors who played the Shawnee characters in the Revolutionary City program we had seen on Wednesday. We didn’t ask many questions but the answers that the actors gave to the questions that other people asked were fascinating. It always enlightening to get a chance to see the world through other people’s eyes and the Native American point of view is one that the rest of us need to try to understand if we want to further justice in our society.

On Saturday our vacation was over. It just remained for us to drive home. We went back via the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on several people’s advice. It probably would have been faster to go back Interstate 95 because the traffic was very slow through Maryland and Delaware. Crossing the bridge was neat though and the countryside of the Eastern Shore of Virginia was pretty but very flat. It was late when we arrived back in Weymouth but we’d very much enjoyed our days in Virginia.

Jamestown and Williamsburg

On Tuesday, April 17th we headed south for a vacation in the Williamsburg, Virginia area. The whole family went, including my parents. My dad did the driving. I would have taken a turn at the wheel but it was his car and he didn't want to share the task. We took my parents’ SUV because unlike our car it is large enough to comfortably hold five people with luggage. We hit the road around 8:30 after we had dropped our cats off at the vet’s to be boarded while we were away. It was a long day in the car and we arrived in Williamsburg around supper time. We checked into our B&B, the Cedars, which was very attractive and comfortable, a marvelous place to stay.

After we had unpacked the car we headed out for dinner. We picked Berret’s, the first restaurant we saw but a good choice. We all enjoyed our meals. The food and the service were excellent. None of us really needed desert but the delicious smell of the peach-apple cobbler from the next table was enough to tempt us. On our waiter’s advice we ordered two orders for the table because it was too large a dish for one. Two orders was enough but the cobbler tasted every bit as good as it smelled. In fact, it was declared to be the best desert Maura had ever had in a restaurant. We are still talking about it a week later.

After a good night’s sleep we gathered for breakfast. My birthday, which was earlier in the month, was celebrated with a candle in a muffin and Bob, our genial host, took our pictures. Then, after a quick stop at the Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Center to pick up our tickets we headed down the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown Island, the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America (and, of course, in Virginia). The site saw many firsts but it has long been abandoned as a town and to unpracticed eye there isn’t much there to see. Fortunately we were able to take an archaeological tour of the site of the first fort at Jamestown led by one of its excavators. Once thought to have been washed away by the James River the site of the fort was discovered in 1994 and found to be mostly still on land. Archaeologists have been at work there ever since and have discovered tens of thousands of artifacts that shed light on the history of the site and the life of the early settlers. During our tour we heard a fascinating presentation that touched on the early history of Jamestown and on the ways that archaeologists learn about it from the artifacts and the traces left behind in the soil by human activity. Afterwards we made a short visit to the Archaearium, a museum dedicated to the finds from the site. I enjoyed seeing some of the things that our guide had seen excavated but Maura was beginning to tire, so we headed back to the Historic Jamestown Visitor Center. Maura turned in her paperwork for her Junior Ranger badge and we headed back to Williamsburg for lunch and a short rest. There was much more at Jamestown that we didn’t see. We never explored most of the ruins of the 17th century town beyond the first fort. We also didn’t visit the reconstructed Jamestown Settlement on the mainland at all. Perhaps someday we will go back but we couldn’t see everything this trip.

After lunch we went to Colonial Williamsburg for the rest of the afternoon. Colonial Williamsburg is a living history museum made up of a collection of buildings, some restored originals and some reproductions based on documentary evidence and archaeological exploration of the site. Buildings that are open to the public are furnished as they might have been in the 18th century. Colonial Williamsburg is staffed by reenactors and interpreters in 18th century dress. Reenactors play the roles of 18th century people. Interpreters admit the existence of the 21st century but demonstrate some aspect of 18th century life, often by practicing an 18th century trade. On Wednesday afternoon we arrived in Williamsburg late enough that we didn’t see many of the shops and houses that were open but we did get to take in the Revolutionary City programs that reenacted events from the time of the American Revolutionary War as they happened in Williamsburg. Some of the characters were well known people such as George Washington and Benedict Arnold but others were poor whites, African American slaves, or Native Americans. The program was excellently done and gave a view of how the war affected people who might not have benefited much from American independence.

Our dinner in the evening was at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern, one of the taverns in Colonial Williamsburg. We had been looking forward to it but the evening was not as enjoyable as we had hoped. The entertainment was good—both the singer who performed with her guitar in the dining room singing 18th century songs and the character portrayals of our waitress and of our hostess who portrayed Mistress Christiana Campbell herself. As a server the waitress seemed a bit overwhelmed. She forgot things we had ordered and brought food to the table cold. The food would have been better had we been served it promptly and the evening would have more fun and memorable as we had hoped it would be.

While dinner was a slight disappointment the day as a whole was fun for everyone and we had two more days to enjoy in the Williamsburg area which I will write about next week.