Our Angle on Virginia’s Historic Triangle

A little over 400 years ago, 105 Englishmen determined that a buggy swamp just off the Chesapeake Bay would be a great place to start a colony, even though the area had no reliable supply of drinking water and was surrounded by Indians.They arrived by boat.

They established a fort.

They raised their flag.

They honored their King by calling the settlement Jamestown.

They toiled. They starved. They died.

They prayed for food and for long, healthy, toil-free, lives.

Many cursed John Smith, even though he nearly single-handedly saved the colony.

Then the women came. The complaining increased. Moreover, the local Powhatan Indian women did not take kindly to the competition. Pocahontas, daughter of a local chief, fiercely protected her territory. She moved in on John Rolfe. Mr. Rolfe put a ring on it. Rolfe brought his wife to London and showed her off. Pocahontas achieved great fame by virtue of her being a spectacle, making her a 17th-century Kardashian.

After many years, and the discovery of a cash-crop (tobacco), the colonists thrived.

Virginia thrived. Eventually, thirteen English colonies thrived.

150 years later, many of those colonists no longer liked their King. They wanted to be as free as bald eagles.

The colonists took up arms and received the help of the French to stick it to the man. After many years of war, the focus shifted to Yorktown, a small town just a few miles from the long-abandoned Jamestown Settlement. The Patriots and French marched through Williamsburg, the town that usurped Jamestown as capital of Virginia after the colonists finally figured out that aristocrats do not belong in buggy swamps. They surrounded a great English army led by General Cornwallis and the Yorktown siege began. Canon fire pummeled the English.

The Patriots and French tightened the noose by capturing Redoubts 9 and 10, the last of Cornwallis’s outer defenses.

Withering point-blank bombardment forced Cornwallis to seek terms of surrender. Representatives met at the Moore House.

The Patriots insisted that Cornwallis surrender without military honors. Eventually, Cornwallis conceded and the English laid down their arms at Surrender Field and left with their tails between their legs.