American History: Early American Settlements: Jamestown 1607

After studying many of the early American explorers, including Sir Walter Raleigh--the Englishmen that first explored and settled the Chesapeake Bay area, we began a new segment of American History: Early American Settlements. Now I realize that the Spanish, the French, and others built settlements in America before the English, but for our purposes, we decided to spend more time on the prominent English settlements. And of course, the first of these (if you don't count Roanoke) was the amazing Jamestown colony. Oh Jamestown! How I have learned to love Jamestown! I could go into so much detail explaining why Jamestown is significant and how God played a hand in it's survival. (See the chapter on Jamestown in Seven Miracles That Saved America for more info.) I could give a full discourse on the necessity of Jamestowns' survival to the later pilgrimage of the real "chosen" immigrants--the Pilgrims and Puritans. (For instance, just think for a minute about the motives of the two separate groups, the composition of their immigrants, and their eventual outcome historically!!) But rather than bore you all with my personal historical analysis, suffice it to say that we (me mostly) thoroughly enjoyed our class on the Jamestown Colony. And I will be forever grateful that we managed to squeeze it in before we rolled into the modern Jamestown Colony Parking lot. (Though I do confess that we just barely shut the book as we got out of the car!) And oh how fun visiting Jamestown was, especially since Uncle Eric and the kids' cousins Mikey and Matthew could join us for all the fun. It was another day of Hoskins homeschooling at its best!!

And here are the pictures to prove it.

First, a few shots of us crossing the river on the ferry. We felt just like the early settlers who also came by boat!







And now the shots at Jamestown. First at the archeological dig site,















And then at the refurbished settlement.

































And even though we didn't really get into its historical significance too much, (we're not that far into American history yet) I just have to include a few shots of our family at Colonial Williamsburg as well.









And yes, this is Mason studying horse poop! Don't ask me why, but he was a bit obsessed with it while we were at Williamsburg. Kind of like Emma couldn't be torn away from the fish guts at the Indian camp in Jamestown. Whose kids are these anyway!?