July 24, 2006: Williamsburg & Alexandria

I’m something of a history buff, but I’ve chosen not to subject my sons to too much of it on this trip. By my standards, we're giving short shrift to historical sites. We didn’t detour to Charleston, South Carolina, to see Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started in 1860. And we didn’t do as my aeronautical engineer father did and make a pilgrimage to Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight at Kill Devil Hill in 1903. We didn't visit George Washington's Mt. Vernon or Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or any of a dozen more places we could or should have seen. There will be time for them when the boys have grown, have studied more, and have cultivated a greater interest and motivation.

But I did drag the boys to one place that my father also took us: Colonial Williamsburg, a town Debbie had never visited. It’s home to the second-oldest college in North America, William and Mary, founded in 1693. (Harvard, founded in 1636, is the oldest.) Although Williamsburg residents have all modern conveniences, the town’s buildings have been restored as much as possible to their eighteenth-century form, inside and out. Hundreds of costumed people live and work there in historical style, recreating and explaining life in the colonial period for visitors. It’s a living laboratory for students of American history, and hordes of people come every year to observe and learn about the past.

We parked at the visitor’s center, perused its big bookstore, and then walked over a long bridge into the early 1700s, telling the boys we were using a time machine. We first visited a plantation, where we met a farmhand.

He was only too happy to let Danny help him weed the corn.

We met woodworkers who were understandably reluctant to let Tommy get his hands on their freshly-honed hatchets,

and a man who portrayed a slave. He showed us his one-room house, his chickens, his garden, and the mortar and pestle he used to grind corn.

We walked into town, past the grand Governor’s Palace

and the parish church. We heard an organist rehearsing inside.

We stopped at a few of the dozens of shops scattered about the place, where we bought some lemonade, ice cream, and gifts. Then we strolled along Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag (to use a twentieth-century expression), shopped for toys, and wound up at William and Mary’s first structure.

The Wren Building, erected in 1695 and still in use, is the oldest academic edifice in the US.





Close by is Jamestown, site of the first successful English settlement in America, which contains an archeological dig and a huge museum with a reconstruction of the original stockade that protected the colonists in 1607. And just up the road is Yorktown, another historical city and the site of the final major battle of the Revolutionary War, where American forces besieged the British in 1791. The British surrender led to the Treaty of Paris and the formal recognition of American Independence. Alas, we didn’t have time to visit either of these sites.

For the student of history, visiting the area is like trying to drink from a fire hose. Everything has a story and is connected to a hundred other things. A short visit, while picturesque, only whets the appetite and impresses the visitor with his or her inadequate understanding and appreciation. The devotion of Revolutionary War buffs easily rivals that of Civil War enthusiasts.

Before we left Williamsburg, the boys helped Thomas Jefferson, who was composing the Declaration of Independence al fresco on the portable writing desk he invented. I like to think of it as one of the world's first laptops!





On the road, we switched from eighteenth to nineteenth century history. We drove west towards Richmond, captital of the Confederacy, and then north past Fredericksburg, site of the worst Union defeat (or the greatest Confederate victory) of the Civil War. We were late pulling into Alexandria, the suburb of Washington that is home to Debbie's cousin Elisheva, her husband Tobias, and their kids Margalit and Akiva. The latter two were sound asleep, but their parents welcomed us and showed us to our beds. Soon we were sound asleep, too.

Kind reader (to use a turn of phrase from an earlier age), bear with me for just a bit of twentieth-century family history: On our 1968 road trip, my father took us to Belvedere, North Carolina, a former plantation on Albemarle Sound near Norfolk, Virginia. His mother and stepfather, Birchen and Charlie, lived there before World War II. My grandmother was born in Texas in 1892, raised in Tennessee, and worked in Los Angeles at the Locomobile Company of America. There she met her first husband, an oil driller named Tom, and in 1915 gave birth to my dad, also named Tom. Birchen and Tom, Sr., were divorced soon after, and he went to Mexico and Venezuela to work in the oil fields there. During WWII, Birchen followed Charlie, her second husband and a Navy captain, who was deployed to places as far flung as the Finger Lakes in New York and Bremerton in Washington State. She joined Dad at Los Alamos in 1943 and after the war settled permanently in Southern California. She passed away in 1983 at the age of 90.