THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 7, 1997 TAG: 9701070001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 49 lines
Gov. George F. Allen will ask the Virginia General Assembly to approve $400,000 - more than double the current annual state funding - for next year's ongoing archeological excavation in and around the triangular Jamestown Fort.
The governor's request is unrelated to the Virginia Port Authority's recent award of a $3.66 million contract to Tidewater Construction Corp. for the extension of Pier B at the Newport News marine terminal to 990 feet.
But Jamestown and the upgrading of Pier B to draw more cruise ships to Hampton Roads are linked insofar as Virginia tourism draws sustenance from Virginia history. When asked about the choice of the Newport News terminal for cruise ships, VPA executive director Robert Bray explained that the placement is logical because of the facility's proximity to Colonial Williamsburg, Yorktown and Jamestown.
The archaeological dig at Jamestown has unearthed the foundation of two sides of the Jamestown Fort and more than 100,000 artifacts.
Among the retrieved objects is a ring believed to have been worn by William Strachey, who wrote a detailed description of the fort in 1610. Strachey's work helped scientists pinpoint the fort site, which some feared had been lost forever to the James River. Strachey's written account of being shipwrecked at Bermuda while voyaging to Virginia in 1609 is thought to have inspired William Shakespeare to write ``The Tempest.''
The Jamestown dig - a project of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities - is highly interesting to archaeologists, historians, sociologists and other scholars - and nonscholars, too, who will be eager to see the artifacts and read and hear what the scholars say about them.
Governor Allen and his wife, Susan, vigorously promote Virginia as a travel destination just as they promote development of other key sectors of the economy. History is among Virginia's strongest appeals to tourists and sightseers as the scene of the first permanent English settlement in the New World, as the home of leading champions of the American Revolution and the author of ``The Declaration of Independence,'' as the place where Lord Cornwallis surrendered his besieged forces to Gen. George Washington, as the land in which much of the Civil War was fought and the fate of the outnumbered and outgunned Confederacy was settled. And buggy, marshy, malarial Jamestown was where Englishmen gained, at brutal cost to themselves and the First Americans whom they encountered, a precarious toehold in the wilderness.
The London-based Virginia Company, which dispatched the Englishmen to Jamestown in quest of riches, went bankrupt. But the Virginia legislature need not blink at appropriating $400,000 for the Jamestown excavation. Thar's gold in that thar dig.