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From Primedia Publications
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John Smith's Virginia Village (cont.)
The Gentry Landed
Trouble was, many of Jamestown’s first settlers had never done an honest day’s labor. For every craftsman or laborer boarding the ships bound for Virginia in 1607, an English gentleman signed on as well. Most were “second sons,” minor aristocrats raised in luxury and ease, who were left comparatively little when their older brothers inherited the family fortunes. They headed for Virginia not to tame a continent but hoping to pocket the gold and gems rumored to cover the ground in the New World. They ate just as much as the craftsmen but considered physical labor beneath them.

Boatloads of settlers following them also carried aristocrats. In 1608 then-president John Smith set up a new policy — those who did not work, did not eat. He angrily wrote the Virginia Company: “When you send againe, I entreat you rather send but thirty Carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, fisher men, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided; than a thousand of such as we have; for except we be able both to lodge them, and feed them, the most will consume with want of necessaries before they can be made good for any thing.”



The London Company remained insensitive to colonial realities. In August 1609 — after the planting season was long over — resupply ships unexpectedly delivered 500 new colonists. Their untimely arrival led to the colony’s most tragic winter — known as “The Starving Time.” By spring, only 60 settlers survived. They were ready to abandon Jamestown and sail for England when more supplies and settlers arrived. Commanded by Lord De la Warr, they revived the colony.

In 1608 then-president John Smith set up a new policy — those who did not work, did not eat.
Determined to wrest a profit from the Jamestown venture, the Virginia Company launched a series of enterprises. Among the earliest was a hunt for the fabled Northwest Passage; Smith was ordered to ply the Chesapeake and its tributaries looking for an easy route to the Orient, where riches as precious as gold could be had. Smith seems to have realized this plan was folly but dutifully, if perfunctorily, obeyed. Meanwhile, having failed to discover gold, the other colonists began making glass.

No one knows why glass-making seemed a promising business to settlers; maybe they thought a virtually limitless supply of wood made Virginia a natural spot for this industry, which required enormous quantities of fuel to keep furnaces going. The remains of this venture include some of the earliest positively identified ruins at Jamestown. They sit away from the original site, on the same side of Powhatan Creek as the reconstructed settlement area, but access is through Colonial National Historical Park.

The remains of the original brick furnaces amount to little more than small scratches on an enormous landscape — a reminder of how tenuous a hold the English had on the North American continent. The colonists soon considered this industry a failure and abandoned the glassworks. But — much, much later — glass-blowing proved successful at Jamestown. Nearly four centuries after the settlers founded this business, glass blowers still work at their craft here. Just a little farther down the footpath from the glasshouse of 1608 stands a 1956 reconstruction, where present-day glass blowers produce simple jars and vases.

After John Smith, the English name most closely associated with the Jamestown colony is John Rolfe. One of the few early settlers to make an economic impact on the colony, he also later married the famed princess Pocahontas. Not long after Jamestown’s glass industry collapsed, Rolfe hit upon the profitable commodity everyone had looked for — tobacco. By 1618, a decade after the colonists built the glasshouse, Jamestown’s tobacco crop reached 50,000 pounds annually. By then the glasshouse was probably already an overgrown ruin, but the tobacco business left a legacy far more enduring. In 1619, the first shipload of Africans arrived in Virginia, supplying labor needed to work the fields. Within a few years, the institution of slavery was recognized by law in North America.

In addition to labor, tobacco farming required large plots of land. During the 1620s the colony expanded beyond the immediate vicinity of the fort until dozens of small settlements lined both banks of the James River. Jamestown Island remained the hub of the colony, but business centered on the New Towne area, not the fort. After a last war with the Powhatans in 1622, settlers pushed Indians out of the area, and the unneeded defense fell into disrepair.

Today, the fort’s exact location is unknown, and visitors may be surprised to see maps indicating the most likely site is a spot now in the James River. In 1607, the riverbank extended another 700 feet or so beyond the present water’s edge. Erosion, however, took a drastic toll on the Jamestown Island coast in the 1700s and 1800s. The Army Corps of Engineers erected a sea wall in 1906 to prevent further loss of soil.

In the 1930s and 1950s, archaeologists dug extensively at Jamestown, never finding the fort. Their lack of success gave credence to the idea the old defense sat underwater. But in 1994, that theory came into question. Off-shore surveys using side-scanning sonar failed to pinpoint any traces of the fort, and historians reconsidered where it might have stood.

One of the most prominent structures on Jamestown Island is the brick church tower, dated about 1647. The attached Memorial Church, built in this century, stands on foundations of an earlier 1639 church, as well as a structure built in 1617. These foundations have been exposed, so visitors to the Memorial Church can look at some of the earliest masonry in America, laid within a decade of the colony’s establishment.

Archaeologists and historians can look too, and they’ve begun to suspect the foundations tell a more important story. In the 1600s, before erecting a church, clergy consecrated the site to its holy purpose for all time. Today, investigators suspect the colonists, having consecrated the earth, would have been reluctant to move their church to a new location for any but the most compelling reason, and the two foundations beneath the site of the Memorial Church seem to confirm that new churches were put up on old consecrated ground. So archaeologists now think the 1617 church may have been not the first built on the site, but the second and that its predecessor was the original wattle-and-daub church known to have stood within the walls of James Fort.

To check this out, archaeologists from the nearby College of William and Mary dug up ground around Memorial Church in 1994, turning up traces of a wood palisade. In September 1996 archeologists discovered the remains of the long-lost original fort. They also found the skeleton of a dead colonist who had been killed by gunfire, leading to speculation that he may have died during an attempted mutiny.

Such theories underscore the settlement’s difficult history. Other colonies — such as Philadelphia, New York or Boston — never stopped growing. But this one, once bustling enough to be known as “James Cittie,” was abandoned after the 1698 fire destroyed most of it. The next year, the Virginia colony’s General Assembly decided to move the capital to Williamsburg rather than rebuild Jamestown. Over the next few generations, Jamestown Island reverted to wilderness.

Two centuries passed before a spirit of nationalism took hold and prompted people to remember Jamestown as the start of something big and a site worth preserving. In 1889, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities acquired 22 1/2 acres surrounding the old church tower, still standing, but by then, most physical traces of the colony lay beneath the earth. Over time, they recovered a horde of artifacts — nails, pottery, door hinges, eating utensils, swords — to go on display in the Visitor Center.

When the National Park Service purchased the rest of the island, it carried on the policy of preserving rather than rebuilding. As a result, it is no great chore to stand by the riverbank on Jamestown Island and imagine yourself to be a Powhatan Indian, looking on in amazement as three ships sail upstream, wondering what it will all lead to.
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