Travels in History

Day Five: Events Leading to the Revolution

We had another day in Williamsburg today, with a focus on events the launched the Revolution.

We started at the Capitol where we took the basic tour I have been on with students, but Bunny did a private version for us before the regular tours started at 9am.

From the Capitol we walked to the Gaol, where we learned more about the court system and the treatment of prisoners.

We met some nice sheep after that.  They are historic sheep.

We stopped at the printing office to learn about the mechanics of the printing business and the economics of paper and ink.

After our talk from the printer we visited the Mary Stith House where we were to "Meet a Person of the Past."  This was all it said on our schedule.  The person turned out to be Clementina Rind, a widow in town who took over her husband's printing trade and managed to keep all his contracts even though she was a woman.  It took me quite a while to figure out that she was being played by our own friend Darci!  Several people in the group did not figure it out until she came out of character at the end, and one or two never recognized her!

Our next stop was the Magazine (which comes from a word for a place to store things of a like kind) where we learned about the Gunpowder Incident.  We got a little rain on the way over, but not much.  My group had heard most of this earlier in the week when we went hunting for information about primary sources, but it was a different interpreter, so it was not exactly the same.

Time for lunch, today at the DeWitt Wallace Museum.  The food was fine, and the exhibits were interesting.  I had not been to the museum before.  The folk art collection is fantastic.

We hopped on the bus to the Palace, where we were to have a tour of the palace with Lady Dunmore herself.  It took much less time this time around for us to recognize her, it was Darci again!

She had to say some strange things to make the tour work and stay in character -- "I don't know why he has left the pantry door open, but you might as well take a look..." but it was great fun to have her take us around.  She kept pointing out things that were out of date, and blaming the decorator hired by some earlier governor.  She thought the leather wallpaper was terrible, and she did not like the green and purple bed clothes.

We had a very short application session.  I should be working on my part of the lesson, because our group is not even remotely done. It is a bit hard, since our topic is Yorktown, and we don't visit Yorktown until tomorrow, but really we have just been disorganized. I should be doing that now.

We had dinner on our own.  George (the peer facilitator and the only other one who seems addicted to wifi like I am) and I tried to have pizza delivered to the basement with the wifi and the ghosts, but Papa Johns would not deliver there -- something about not having a phone number, even though we had a cell phone number.  So we walked to Market Square and got pizza there, but we could not work on our computers.

I did find the Thomas Jefferson statue.

Our evening program was "Dance, Our Dearest Diversion."  There were demonstrations and some audience participation.  I was happy enough not to get picked to dance.

Day Four: Economy Day!

Today we focused on life and business in 18th century Virginia -- or, as we all learned to call it, "economy day." We heard Darcy Tucker tell us all about indentured servitude, the trans-atlantic slave trade, and African-American life in 18th century Virginia (yes, I can give these lectures, in fact I have in other contexts, but it is always interesting to hear from someone else and see how they explain things). We did all of this using primary documents (yes, they are on the CD! They give us a CD of teaching materials and primary sources, and the running joke has been with every set of materials we have used, we ask if is on the CD, and they say yes).

Then we traveled to Great Hopes Plantation were the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is constructing a small plantation farm. We learned about growing tobacco (not an easy crop), curing the leaves, and selling it.

We picked worms off some plants and pulled off the small sucker leaves.

We had lunch at Chowning's Tavern, and then used a small building to the right of the Palace as a classroom for Kelly's economics lectures. We learned about tradesmen and merchants, and then we headed out into the town to ask the tradesmen and merchants we saw several questions about their work. It was a good experience to go to the different places with a set goal in mind, in this case finding out specific information about what kinds of people went into this line of work, where they got their raw materials, how much of their work involved repair, and what were the most expensive things they sold and the least expensive. I think I want to come up with some questions for students to ask as they visit places in Williamsburg -- it is much easier to talk to the tradesmen when you have a focus for your questions.

On the way back we met General George Washington. I even remembered my courtesies, and asked him most properly how the war progressed. He gave us a most favorable report.

After a debrief and discussion session, and a short application session to work on our projects, we took the Williamsburg shuttle to the Visitor Center where we had bad pizza for dinner. Seriously, it is the first bad food we have had, and it was not that bad. We had ice cream for dessert.

This was supposed to be our free evening, but we had found out that Kelly also works as a guide for the ghost tours, and we wanted to go on one, so she arranged to give us a special one (teacher discount too!) It was quite something hearing all sorts of stuff about ghosts which I don't believe from someone I trust.

Several of the group decided it would be more fun to go on the ghost tour dressed as ghosts, so they wore sheets (yes, they took them from their beds). I did not make it back to my room before the tour, so I did not really have to think about participating in this. Kelly loved it, and it was funny, but of course it was hot to wear a sheet.

The only problem was that it was getting hotter not cooler as the night went on. This was by far the most hot and sticky day we have had. There is a storm coming in.

Day Three, Williamsburg

Today's theme was Colonial Life in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, with an emphasis on religion and local government. We began the day by learning our "courtesies" how ladies and gentlemen bowed and greeted one another in the 18th century. Then we did an election activity, one that could be used in class, and then participated in a "mini trial" in the courthouse.

We were then let loose on the Revolutionary City to view the drama for the day. The program ranges up and down the street with bits of drama leading up to the revolution. The best bit was a bunch of patriots staging a farce of a trial of a loyalists who taunted the Virginia soldiers. The tourist jury voted to tar and feather him! Kelly had recommended we see this one, since her boyfriend played the loyalist.

In the end when he was tied to the pole and the guy was waving the tar stick around, he said he would issue a public apology, so they did not go through with the tar and feathers.

We spent the afternoon learning more about religion and visiting the Payton Randolph House.

In the evening we went to a which trial at the General Court (in the Capitol). We, the gentlemen of the court, voted not guilty, but it was mostly based on our disbelief in the superstitions and the sense that she was just a bitter old women none of her neighbors liked, rather than any good defense she could give, that swayed the vote.

Now I am relaxing in the basement of the house that has wifi. I will work on my Yorktown stuff for a while, then go to bed.

Day Two in Williamsburg

We started off today with breakfast at the King’s Arms Tavern. We had a lovely buffet, in high style, including a sorbet fruit drink. I should have taken a photo of breakfast for Alex. I think we eat there again, I will try to remember.

After that Kelly took us on a walk around much of the historical district, talking about the creation of historic Williamsburg and some of the ways buildings were acquired and restored. We saw an archeological dig on Nicholson street and we looked at several of the buildings and talked about the construction.

She also pointed out some things that they had fundamentally changed from the original in order to make the experience of the living history museum more pleasant. There is little natural stone in this part of Virginia, so they did not have ready supplies for cobblestones or other pavers, so the Duke of Gloucester Street was described as a mile long, 90 feet wide, and 2 feet deep. Today it is paved with brick sidewalks. The historic district is full of beautiful tall mature trees, but one of the first things the colonists did when they moved the capitol from Jamestown to Middle Plantation and renamed it Williamsburg was cut down the trees. Trees would have been a fire hazard, because of lightening, and they were trying to build an 18th century urban metropolis, and trees would just not have fit that image. But the trees were there in the 1930, and they are so beautiful, and we are all glad they left them. Another change they had to make was the height of the fences in front of houses. In the colonial period they would not have been the cute 3-4 foot high picket fences, they would have been tall, taller than a man, to give some privacy from the street. But for the museum we want people to be able to see the houses, so the white picket fences that we all so much associate with the colonial period, and with Williamsburg, are not historically accurate.

We spent the rest of the morning at Wetherburn's Tavern learning about how the staff at Williamsburg use primary sources to reconstruct buildings and learn the histories of the people who lived in them. We were then sent off in our groups to work with some primary sources at other locations. Our group, which is working on the Battle of Yorktown, had a letter from a Revolutionary War soldier, visited the Magazine to talk to the interpreter there.

After lunch at the Golden Horseshoe (Dad, it is on a golf course, said to be one of the most beautiful public courses around, you have probably played there of course) we walked to Bruton Heights School.

Bruton Height School is now owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and used as a classroom and office building. But in the first half of the 20th century it was the segregated school for African-American children.

We did several primary source exercises. The best one was based on the life of Matthew Ashby. It involved three groups working on different documents to try to put together the story of his life, and it took all three to make sense of any of it.

What really gave the story punch was the visit of an interpreter who was Anne Ashby, his wife, after we had finished the exercise. She was fantastic in character, and then she came out of character to talk to us about how she works on the character.

Later in the afternoon we had a lecture about using the technology put out by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and then we had a short session to work in our groups before dinner.

After dinner we saw a fantastic program of African stories -- very much like the African-American experience we see on the DC trip -- called Papa Said, Mama Said.

WiFi in the strangest places

Out in front of the Court House.

The House Where I Am Staying

Jamestown and More Jamestown

Today we visited Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the new world (they say that a lot). Jamestown is actually two main sites, the archeological site (where they found the real fort in the 1990s) which is run by APVA and the surrounding area which is run by the national park service, and the reconstructed fort and ships of the Jamestown Settlement (if you have been here, but not recently, the place has been hugely expanded for last year's 400th anniversary). We take the 8th graders to the Jamestown Settlement, and the tour we got today was mostly the longer version of the one we get with the students.

But I had never been to the actual fort, and it is amazing.

They have only found about 10 percent of the interior buildings, but they have almost all of the fortifications (just missing the bit that has fallen into the James River). They have a great museum too.

Then we went to the Jamestown Settlement (yes, we had lunch at the Jamestown Settlement Cafe, but it was a pre-made salad, soda, and a cookie, not the Worldstrides meal ticket). We had the long version of the tour through the Powhatan village, the three ships (the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Goodspeed) and the fort.

It had rained in the morning, but by the time we were out and about it was almost sunny and very warm. I spent much of the tour thinking about what works and what does not work with this kind of tour. What keeps people's interest? We were all teachers, all interested, and still at any given point some of us were dragging. The interactive things worked -- we all perked up when we were asked to make rope (out of raffia, because the swamp weeds the Powhatan used are now protected). And when I got a chance to walk quickly for a few minutes that woke me up. It is the slow shuffle and listen pace of the way these things work that seems to be the biggest problem. I hope I can think of some things to do to spice that up for our students.

I did get to go through the museum (last time we were there the other groups went there but the interpreter my group was with took so long at the other places we did not get there). It is fantastic.

We had dinner at the King's Arms Tavern, very nice, but slow. We would not have cared, because it was pleasant inside, but we had to be at the Kimball Theatre at 8pm for a performance of Wit's Last Stake, a comedy from the 18th century.

Orientation

Wednesday night we started our program with dinner and an orientation meeting at Season's restaurant at Market Square. There are 22 teachers, plus one experienced teacher/peer facilitator, plus the staff and interns for the Williamsburg Foundation.

The teachers come from all over. There is one other teacher from California (far northern California!) several from Texas, and some from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New York, and I am sure I am forgetting someplace. Almost all of us teach 8th grade history. A few teach other subjects (one art teacher).

We spent some time talking about what we will be doing this week, and what kinds of activities we will be able to take back to the classroom. All but one of the teachers are in public schools, and their experience is clearly very different from mine at Castilleja.

One of the things I will need to focus on is keeping my enthusiasm for things that are new to many of the people on the trip, but because of the DC trip not new at all to me. The good news is I am not lost, and I can help people with directions and stuff like that, but the bad news is that for the main sites I have heard some version of the program (in some cases 7 times!), and it can be difficult to be as excited about it this time in the heat and humidity. But if I focus my attention on the student experience, and on what kinds of things I can do with the information, I should be able to get something new out of the things I have seen and done before.

Lunch at the Cheese House Yesterday

Only Kristin will really enjoy this, but it was funny enough for me to want to record. We have, on many occasions, ordered box lunches on the DC trip, and we used to get them from a place in Williamsburg called the Cheese House. Year after year, from many places, we have had trouble with our box lunch order. We would order turkey sandwiches, and get half ham, and they would often leave out the vegetarian ones. Well, I went to the cheese house for lunch on Wednesday, and I had a great lunch, but it was not what I had ordered! I got white bread rather than wheat. I had to laugh.

I did, however, find a seat inside, which was a good thing, since the rain was coming down hard.

Blogging from the 18th Century

Blogging will be sporadic at best.

The 18th century is not quite ready for wifi.

Here I am in my very cute room in an 18th century house.  The good news is the basics have been brought into the 20th century.  The AC works great.  But the computer access is another story.

We are off to Jamestown today, to see the archeological site as well as the reconstructed settlement.