Jamestown Church Tower, Rear View, showing Old Foundations.
Copyright, 1906, by Jamestown Official Photo. Corp'n.
The peninsula, to-day an island, was divided into farms, and "martial ranks of corn" stood in the plain on which John Smith exercised his men in military evolutions. Around the church the young trees had it all their own way, clasping the gravestones and bearing them aloft in their strong young arms. There was nobody to hinder or protest.
In 1856 the peninsula had become an island, and access to it was by a rowboat. A large portion of the island was already engulfed by the waves. The bank was giving away within one hundred and fifty feet of the old tower of the church. Travellers in the excursion boats to Old Point Comfort began to observe the singular behaviour of a large cypress tree in the river opposite the tower. The cypress seemed to be slowly moving onward. An old traveller remembered that the tree in 1846 stood on land; it was now two hundred and ninety feet in the water from the shore! Evidently the shore itself was receding. Through the munificent gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Barney, in 1895, twenty-two acres of the island, including its historic area, came into the possession of the Association for the Preservation of Virginian Antiquities—a band of daughters of Virginia organized to rescue from decay and oblivion the sites of her early history, carving anew, like the Antiquary at the graves of the slaughtered Presbyterians, the story of those who "broke the way with tears."
Our guests on our anniversary day will not find the picturesque old church tower standing alone, looking toward the sea to which the anxious eyes of the sleepers beneath had been cast in the early days of starvation. Weakened by the storms of nearly three centuries, the old tower demanded support. The church has been rebuilt upon the old plan and the old foundations. A splendid sea-wall has been given by the government to the women of the Virginia Association—to do what their feeble hands tried but could not do. All is changed—except the old cypress far out in the water, which keeps its own secret, and refuses to yield to time, or wave, or change. Who knows? Perhaps his clasping roots may hold that other child of the forest, the old brave chieftain Opechancanough.
Part of the humble little town has been exhumed. The walls and foundations of the third and fourth churches, and of some few houses have been laid bare. Very few relics have been discovered; the bones of a gigantic man, the cenotaph of a knight, skeletons which crumbled at the touch of the air, shot from some alien gun, a bit here and there of broken crockery. But beneath the mould of two centuries was found evidence of another and lasting foundation, the fundamental basis of all happiness, all moral good, and all national prosperity—that of the simple, wholesome domestic life of the fireside. A pipe, scissors, thimble, and candlestick lay together in one of the uncovered chambers.
CHAPTER XXIII
LEGENDS OF THE OLD STONE HOUSE
The "Old Stone House" on Ware Creek, according to the Virginia historians, was the resort, at three different times, of the disembodied spirits of famous historical characters. "This unfinished stone edifice, evidently designed for a fortification, stands on a hill facing the water, and is difficult of access by reason of the impenetrable thickets and ravines overgrown with mountain laurel by which it is surrounded. Only by following a narrow path on the top of a wooded ridge can it be approached."[86] In consequence of its evil name nobody two hundred years ago ever visited it; and if a belated huntsman stumbled upon it by accident, he made haste to retrace his steps, frightened by the dark corners suggestive of hiding-places, and awed by the warning whispers of the wind as it sighed through the pines.
The country around it is desolate. The ravines are filled with poisonous vines and tenanted by the deadly rattlesnake. The house itself is a roofless ruin, embroidered by ivy and caressed by the Virginia creeper, the long boughs of which, like long arms, wave in the air to warn away all intruders.
The building is small, of solid masonry, the walls two feet thick, pierced with loopholes for musketry. There is one door from which stone steps descend to an underground chamber. This is probably the first stone house ever built by the English colonists, and is generally conceded by historians and antiquarians to be the edifice of which in 1609 Anas Todkill and others wrote to the London Company, "We built a fort for a retreat neere a convenient river, upon a high commanding hill very hard to be assaulted and easie to be defended; but the want of corne occasioned the end of all our worke, it being worke enough to provide victuall."
In this provision of "victuall," the starving colonists, as we have seen, were aided by Pocahontas, who brought, it is supposed, her "wild train" laden with baskets of food as far as this house, and there dismissing them, waited for Captain John Smith. The spot was favourable as a hiding-place from the fury of her father, the old king whose house was not far away, with its substantial chimney built by the treacherous Dutchmen. Here Pocahontas may have rested when she came "through the irksome woods with shining eyes" to warn her hero of danger and treachery from her own people.