Historical Significance of The Site
The first permanent English settlement in the area which is now the United States established in the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, beginning on May 14, 1607. Upon arrival, the colonists set about constructing a fort. Within a fortnight, they had completed their initial James Fort.
In 1698, an accidental fire destroyed the statehouse at Jamestown, and the legislature and seat of government temporarily relocated to Middle Plantation. The following year, the move became a permanent change, with that town soon renamed Williamsburg. Soon, Jamestown began a period of rapid decline. By the 1750s, the land was owned and heavily cultivated primarily by the Travis and Ambler families. Due to its location on the James River, the island saw some action during the American Revolutionary War (1776-1781) and the American Civil War (1861-1865), but otherwise, became largely desolate and unpopulated.
Read more about this topic: Jamestown Rediscovery
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“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)