This great city of Jamestown, which though insignificant in number of inhabitants and in the area it covered, was a truly great city, for its achievements had been great, was thus laid low at the very
height of its modest magnificence and power. Though but little more than a half century old, it was already historic Jamestown, for with its foundations had been laid, in the virgin soil of a new world, the foundations of the Anglo-Saxon home, the Anglo-Saxon religion, and Anglo-Saxon law. This town, so small in size, so great in import, could proudly boast of a brick church, "faire and large," twelve new brick houses and half a dozen frame ones, with brick chimneys. There was also a brick state house the foundations of which have lately been discovered.
The inhabitants are facetiously described by a writer of the time as for the most part "getting their livings by keeping ordinaries at extra-ordinary rates."
"Thoughtful Mr. Lawrence"—devoted Mr. Lawrence (whose silver plate the Governor had not forgotten to carry off with him, for all his leave-taking was so abrupt)—and Mr. Drummond heroically began the work of ruin by setting the torch to their own substantial dwellings. The soldiers were quick to follow this example, and soon
all that remained of Jamestown was a memory, a heap of ashes, and a smoke-stained church tower, which still reaches heavenward and tells the wayfarer how the most enduring pile the builders of that first little capital of Virginia had heaped up was a Christian temple.
Mr. Drummond (to his honor be it said) rushed into the burning State House and rescued the official records of the colony.
In a letter written the following February Sir William Berkeley said that Bacon entered Jamestown and "burned five houses of mine and twenty of other gentlemen's, and a very commodious church. They say he set to with his own sacrilegious hand."
