Historic Jamestowne

Before anyone decided this peninsula was a good place to build a capital, before the tobacco economy rewired the Atlantic world, there was Jamestown — and for a long time, most historians assumed the James River had swallowed the evidence.

They were wrong. When Dr. William Kelso launched the Jamestown Rediscovery Project in 1994, the working assumption was that the original James Fort had eroded into the river. Within three archaeological seasons, his team had pulled up enough to prove otherwise. The fort was still there, buried in dry land near the church tower. Today, more than two dozen staff members excavate, interpret, and conserve the site — an operation that shows no sign of stopping, because the ground keeps giving.

What stands above ground is stark and old. The church tower, built around 1639, is the oldest standing English structure in America. It predates the political machinery that would eventually move Virginia's colonial capital up the peninsula. It predates almost everything. The settlement it anchored — established in 1607 — was England's first permanent colony in what became the United States, planted twelve miles from where Williamsburg would later grow into the colonial capital.

The human story here is not simple. Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married at this site. What came before and after that moment — the Powhatan Confederacy's displacement, the machinery of early colonial expansion — is part of what the archaeology keeps uncovering, literally and otherwise.

Historic Jamestowne is a joint operation between the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia. The Archaearium museum on-site houses artifacts recovered from the fort. Come because the ground is still being read, and what it says keeps changing.