Visit The Historic Triangle
An Empire of Goods
From its beginnings, Jamestown was a commercial venture. The Englishmen who went to Virginia hoped to discover gold and silver, a navigable route to the East, or a wealthy Indian civilization like those the Spanish had plundered in Central and South America. They found none of these. They also failed to make money initially from such projects as vineyards, silkworms, iron production, and glassblowing. Only when John Rolfe transplanted to Virginia a sweet-scented Spanish tobacco grown in the West Indies did the colonists find a way to make a profit. Tobacco plantations soon spread across the colony and Virginia’s fortune was secured.
With their income from tobacco, planters bought all sorts of goods from England, including fashion and luxury items. In 18th-century Williamsburg, for example, ladies and gentlemen wore London fashions purchased from Jane and Margaret Hunter’s millinery shop. Those who could bought high-quality furniture, silverware, tableware, fabrics, clothes, leather goods, books, guns, and many other items. Williamsburg was connected to Britain’s global empire of goods and in the years leading to the American Revolution became the colony’s most fashionable center of conspicuous consumption.
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Historic Jamestowne
Visit the site of the first permanent English settlement, James Fort, as recently uncovered by archaeological excavation. Learn about the trades attempted at Jamestown as told by the artifacts left by the settlers 400 years ago, now on exhibit in the Archaearium and Visitor Center. The 1608 glasshouse was among the earliest industrial efforts of the English settlers. Today, glassblowers create wine bottles, glasses, candlesticks, pitchers, and other objects using traditional techniques.
Jamestown Settlement
The emergence of tobacco during the 1600s as Virginia’s dominant economic enterprise is traced in gallery exhibits that display examples of fine furnishings bought with profits from the tobacco trade. The museum’s riverfront discovery area highlights economic activities related to water transportation. The re-created fort interprets the military and commercial nature of Jamestown during 1610-1614, and among its structures is the office of the cape merchant, who kept track of goods imported and exported from the colony.
Visit: http://www.historyisfun.org
Colonial Williamsburg
Where else can you see a wigmaker at work? Tradesmen and tradeswomen, apprentices, and interpreters of the Historic Trades program practice more than thirty 18th-century trades. See saddlers, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, brickmakers, carpenters, silversmiths, coopers, tailors, printers, founders, gunsmiths, wheelwrights and more.
Yorktown Victory Center
Historical interpreters at the re-created 1780s farm demonstrate the cultivation of tobacco and corn as cash crops. In a barn where tobacco leaves are hung from poles to cure, visitors learn about the 18-month process from planting seeds to realizing a profit. For many of the individuals profiled in “the Legacy of Yorktown: Virginia Beckons” exhibition, economic opportunity offered by the tobacco trade and the growth of ports was an incentive to settle in Virginia.
Visit: http://www.historyisfun.org
Village of Yorktown
A short walk from the Yorktown battlefield are the remains of a large-scale pottery factory. By illegally making products that competed with those of British potters, William Rogers and his potters helped establish Virginia’s economic independence.
