Tag Archives: Colonial Williamsburg

US History

Living on the West Coast all our lives “historic” means anything from the early 1900s, ancient history for us is the CA Gold Rush and the Spanish Missions. So, we are really excited to get to spend some time on the East Coast and soak up some US History this summer. We spent 5 nights at the Hampton public piers (an amazing value!) and did some exploring while we were there.

First we rode bikes to Fort Monroe and spent a morning cruising around there and visiting the museum. We learned that one of the fort engineers was Robert E. Lee, that after the Civil War Jefferson Davis was imprisoned there, and that things that are that old may be unstable! As we were walking though a brick came falling from the ceiling just one room over from us!

To continue our history exploration we decided to rent a car to visit the Colonial Triangle – Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg. The first day we went to the Jamestown Settlement and learned about the first English colony in Virginia. We toured replicas of the ships they arrived on and Ryan asked me what I’d think of a 4 ½ month voyage on one of those. Well let me just say there is a reason I insisted on a catamaran! We then went through the replicas of the old settlement and got to hold the muskets and visit the cook house…all the fun touristy stuff. We also went through the museum and learned more about the interactions between the English and the Native Americans. All I can say about that is WOW and I’m sorry. And I’m sure they toned it down quite a bit. We also learned more about the story of Pocahontas as well – it is exactly as Disney described. 😉

Once we were done with the museum we headed to Yorktown for a late lunch. There wasn’t much going on there but we had a delicious lunch and walked Stanley around a bit. Ryan saw a steel boat at the Yorktown docks that he had been drooling over in Beaufort and that was pretty much the highlight of Yorktown.

The next day we visited Colonial Williamsburg. I got a distinct Disney vibe as we followed the well marked route to the visitor center. We parked there, bought our tickets, and “headed back in time”. The first building we toured was the Governors Palace. It took a bit of our excitement away when we realized that the entire village had been rebuilt around 1932 by Rockefeller and weren’t the original structures. I guess they were able to excavate all the old basements though so the village had the same layout as it did in the 1700s. The tours through the houses were interesting as the guides were all in costume and told the stories of people who had lived there. We ended our day with a tour of the capital building with our guide walking us through how Virginia and the US declared independence from England. Quite exciting stuff….I wonder how it will all turn out….