Things Jim and I learned while visiting Williamsburg, Virginia
You didn’t want to be a Drummer Boy in the Civil War – Commands were given to troops during a battle via the drums so of course everyone was aiming for him
The Stocks is better than the Pillory – If convicted of minor crime, you were either sentenced to time in the Stocks or Pillory. Stocks is where your hands and feet are locked. Pillory is where your head and hands are locked. You were put in the public square where the market was. Animals were sold in the market. People would pick things up and throw them at you. In the Stocks, you could duck when someone threw manure at your head.
Always pack a Down Coat – They pack up very small and you never know when you are going to be hit by a winter storm.
If a piece of land looks perfect, question why no one else lives there – The first permanent British colony was at Jamestown, Virginia, 1607. A decade before the settlement at Plymouth Rock. They settled on a beautiful peninsula up the James River. A place the Indians were not occupying. “Why?” you ask. Come summer, it was surrounded by a mosquito infested swamp land heavy in arsenic. The water from the river was brackish, slightly salty. Many settlers died from arsenic or salt.
Don’t piss off your neighbors – Soon after their arrival, John Smith negotiated a treaty with the nearby Indian tribe. After he returned to England in 1609 during a drought, the English men broke the treaty and attacked an Indian settlement to steal food. The Indians backed the settlers into their fort and would not let them out to farm or hunt. This began a period called the “Starving Time”. The settlement population went from 400+ to 50+ . During a recent archeological dig on the site, they verified that the settlers had to resort to cannibalism after they ate all the pets, horses, and wild animals including the mice.
People will always fight for freedom – It is a part of history that keeps repeating itself. Repressed people will fight back. One of the major causes of death in 1900’s Williamsburg was arsenic poisoning. Slaves ran most kitchens. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the arsenic deaths became rare. Coincidence?
Barbecue Chicken Mac–N–Cheese, yum – Throw a little barbecue sauce in your favorite Mac-n-Cheese. Add roasted chicken and bacon. You have a fabulous dinner.
You don’t need nails to build a fort – You can use wood pegs to hold sticks and poles together, then add mud to build a wall. The technique is called Mud-n-Stud. (See the photos in my gallery below)
A monument might say more about the person that built it than whom it was built for – We took our tours in Jamestown from the archeological society. They are working to piece together history to match what artifacts they have found. The artifacts sometimes prove a different story.
Our trash tells a lot of stories – In Jamestown, they had to dig wells for drinking water. When the well would go bad from salt contamination, they would dig a new one and use the old one for a trash pit. They found over 10,000 artifacts from the 1600’s in one well alone.
You can’t expect New World Bees to pollinate British crops – The British had to import bees. The imported bees were treated better than most people. The colonist even served them baked goods to keep the bees happy.
Tobacco is a 13 month crop – There was never a break. Farming it sounded awful.
One way to stop a rebellion is to divide the rebels – By the middle of the 1600’s, over 70% of the colonists were either indentured servants or slaves. They were bonding together and starting to rebel. The governing body added laws to divide them … “Whites could not work for or be owned by Blacks”. “Whites are required to own guns, but Blacks are not allowed.”
Uber is the way to go – We are not big taxi users. We prefer to walk even if our destination is miles away. But when you are in a hurry, there is always an Uber nearby.
The educated, whites on the winning side, wrote our history books – Pocahontas’s story was written from the view point of the white men that took her prisoner, not by her. We celebrate Plymouth Rock as the first settlement. It is in a northern state and is a warm and fuzzy story. No wars with the Indians. No men dying from starvation. No importing of human flesh.
You can’t hid from your past if you hope to learn anything – Jamestown was the birth place of importing slaves for the British. They were brought in a British ship running under the Dutch flag (common practice so you could pillage Spanish ships and not violate the kings treaty with Spain). Aligning the documents, tells the story. Though the Archeological Society has been digging at Jamestown for over a hundred years, the powers that be refused to recognize the ships as British so the archeologists were not given permission to look for African American artifacts. Less than 10 years ago, the archeologists were finally given permission to start looking. We talked to the archeologists working on the site where one of the first shipment of slaves lived. There were 20+ slaves purchased that day. The exact number and their names were not documented.
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