April 28, 2007 – 'Equality!' I spoke the word as if a wedding vow.

Forgive me, Gawd, for I have sinned. It has been two days since my last blog.

And it’s been a pretty eventful two days.

Yesterday, I woke up in Williamsburg just outside of Colonial Williamsburg (TM).

Here’s the deal with that. Williamsburg was one of the first colonies here in the US that the British established. It was originally founded in 1632 as a fortified settlement and then the people of Jamestown moved there in 1698. It was finally considered a city in 1722 and became the central planning area of the American Revolution. (It was on the steps of the capitol that Patrick Henry and a few others decided that they needed to revolt.)

The city grew around the college (The College of William and Mary, established in 1693, making it the second oldest university in the US) and the first mental hospital in the US, Eastern State Hospital. (It went through some name changes. In the 1770s when it was established, it was known as the Public Hospital for Persons on Insane and Disordered Minds.) It served as the capitol of Virginia until 1780 when that was moved to Richmond because Jefferson thought it was vulnerable to attack.

After the Civil War, things really slowed down for Williamsburg. No train and no port meant no real business. So buildings fell into disrepair and the people fell into complacency. The place was actually called ‘Lotusburg’ by some rather witty journalist.

That’s where Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin comes into play. (Heh. His name is War.)

He is the one who contacted John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and got him to put up the money to completely repair and rebuild Williamsburg and turn it into the first historical theme park. It had to seem pretty crazy back in 1923, but Rockefeller did it and we are still reaping the benefits of it today.

Of the over 500 buildings in Colonial Williamsburg, 88 of them are original colonial buildings. The others were painstakingly rebuilt according to great historical research as to what they looked like in the 18^th Century.

I didn’t buy the $34 ticket, so I didn’t get to go into any of the buildings. But you don’t have to buy a ticket just to walk around the park. That’s because this isn’t just a park. It’s a real town. There were people jogging through because they live there. It’s kinda crazy. There’s all these people dressed in colonial costumes acting as if they live in the 1700s, but there are people living in some of the houses with laptops and coffee makers.

I took a LOT of pictures of Williamsburg. So many, that by the time I got to the third point in the Historic Triangle, I ran out of room on my camera and had to dump them to the computer in the car.

One cool thing that I didn’t get a picture of (because it was kind of impossible) was the walkway to the park. It was a bridge that was supposed to be kind of like a time machine. It gives a date and says things like, ‘You know people who own other people.’ Of course then there was a 50 mile trek to the actual park. You go through this ‘time machine’ that supposedly takes you back to the 1700s, and then you go walk along Ye Olde Freeway. Nice.

Here’s a few of the pics:

(The first thing you see when you finally GET to the park, is an old farm. It’s kind of on the outskirts of town.)

(The Governor’s Palace.)

(The oldest working church in America. It’s been taking in worshipers since the early 1700s…I think)

(The second capitol of Virginia. The first, of course, was in Jamestown. We’ll get to that.)

(Another view of the capitol.)

(A ruin of an early coffee house. Back then they were kind of like bars, but only served men.)

(SHEEP ASS!!!!)

(The site of the first theatre in the Colonies. Which is different from the one in Savannah, because I think that was the first one in Actual America. I don’t find theatrical history. It finds me.)

(The Magazine and Armory. I like flags.)

(The Court House. Again, I like flags. I was amazed at how interested in punishment kids are. They were lined up to put themselves in the stockades. Irony.)

After tooling around Williamsburg for about three or four hours, I headed to where it all began: Jamestown.

I think we all basically know the story of Jamestown. It was set up as a fort first on May 14, 1607. (Yes, our 400^th birthday is coming up, a fact not lost on the people of Virginia.) The people who were sent here were men and boys. No women. After making friends with the Indians, things go really bad for them. You see, they had managed to land here right in the middle of one of the worst droughts that North America had seen in years. It was what the settlers called ‘The Starving Time.’

John Smith (he of the mostly false Pocahontas legend) was the leader of the colony, much to the chagrin of most of the other people in the town. He was considered a braggart and a bit of a fool. But he’s who we have a record of because he wrote down every move that he made. Sometimes history loves a braggart.

The English finally started sending women over and even settling in other locations. Eventually, Jamestown was basically forgotten when the capitol of Virginia was moved to Williamsburg. Soon, it just dried up and faded away. Of the three towns in the Historic Triangle, Jamestown is the only one that is no longer a town.

That, of course, didn’t stop the historic society from setting up a Jamestown Settlement. Just like Colonial Williamsburg, the Jamestown Settlement is a complete rebuild of the original colony complete with people dressed as colonists.

I didn’t go there because a) you have to pay and b) I was more interested in the actual Jamestown. Where was that?

Back to the car.

I finally arrived at the location of the first settlement. After watching a fairly cheesy film about the settlers (‘Listen for the voices of the Jamestown settlers!’ Man, if I hear the voices of the settlers, I’m running the fuck away.) I finally walked out to the settlement and see…another even cheesier movie. They’ve set up a tv out there with a ‘virtual reenactment’ of things that may have actually taken place in Jamestown. (They have things that they’ve dug up that led to these scripts.) But I doubt that anyone in Jamestown ever said anything like, ‘But what of our other major exports: wheat? Barley? Corn?!’ It was worse than some community theatre.

But beyond that was the settlement itself. There’s not much left of it. In fact, there’s only one building of the original settlement still sort of standing. (The remnants of a house built in the 1700s and destroyed by a fire by century’s end doesn’t count.)

(This is that house.)

The tower of the church is all that’s left of the first permanent European settlement in America. They have built the rest of the church back the way it once was and they are excavating the foundation of the original church.

(It started raining pretty hard, so everybody and their monkey ran for the church. I wouldn’t have worried so much if I hadn’t been right next to the church at the time and ready to go in myself. So, instead of just walking in at a leisurly pace, I was crowded, bumped and could hardly see anything of interest for all the people sticking themselves to any interesting thing in the building. Bastids.)

As for the rest of the town, it’s all under ground. Even the foundations that are showing are just modern bricks that have been placed over the remnants of the past. When they started the excavation in the 30s, they realized that the old stone and brick wasn’t going to withstand the weather anymore, so they buried it all again and built these fake foundations so that we could see where everything was.

(A fake ruin of a longhouse.)

It’s a little eerie to walk around this old town that is 400 years old. It was a lot of our ancestors who built this place. It’s where the dream started. Sure, we were still a colony then, but the seedlings of a great nation took root right here.

The museum that’s actually in the settlement has a lot of artifacts that have been found onsite. For a few weeks, they have two skeletons that were dug up. They will be there only for a little while because Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip will be attending the 400^th birthday celebration

Maybe they’re going to take us back under their wing.

Here’s some of the pics I took here:

(Jamestown Monument. Why do all monuments look like giant penises?)

(A gnarled old tree. Was it there 400 years ago? Dunno.)

(What they think the original James Fort looked like.)

(John Smith)

(Pocahontas)

(Possibly the grave of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, who Smith called the ‘prime moving force’ behind the Jamestown plantation.)

(Where it all truly began, the site of the first landing.)

(And THIS, is the site of the first government building. Before this was built all laws were made in the church nearby. But this was the first ‘capitol’ of sorts.)

The next stop was Yorktown. This is where the Revolution ended. Yorktown was one of the colonies that helped to take the thunder away from Jamestown, but it was never quite as important as Williamsburg. In fact, since its establishment in 1634, they only truly noteworthy thing that has happened there (and it IS pretty fucking noteworthy) is that it is where General Cornwallis surrendered and finally gave us out Independence.

There’s no Yorktown Settlement here, mainly because most of Yorktown still stands as it did when the Revolution was finished. It’s mainly a residential town and there aren’t just a whole lot of people who live there. But it still thrives.

The main attraction here is the battlefield, which takes up about half of the town. I was going to walk around the battlefield until I realized how immensely huge it is. It’s bigger and much more intricate than any of the Civil War battlefields that I walked through. They actually have some of the cannons set up where they were and a lot of the hills that the soldiers made are still standing.

(These are American cannons ready for use against the British attackers. They probably would still work, so watch out Tony.)

(These cannons are…um…ready to kill their audience? I have no clue.)

(Storming the beach at Yorktown.)

Then, just a little ways away from the battlefield, the Yorktown Victory Monument stands. It’s a pretty thing that stands well above anything else in the area. The government passed legislation to allow it to be built in the late 1700s. Finally, almost exactly 100 years later, construction was begun.

(See it? Off in the distance? This was the house of one of the generals…or something like that. Not really sure. But it is an authentic Colonial house.)

(There it is. The lady at the top was destroyed at one point by lightning. Obviously, she was replaced.)

I left the Revolutionary War behind me and headed to where the power lies now: Washington, DC.

It would be good to see my friend, Sara, and her husband again.

But that is a blog for another day. I’m tired and can’t go on anymore.