to
Glasshouse Point, where a glassmaking venture took place in 1608. Over
this isthmus the "Greate Road" ran, and its traces have been discovered
on the island as far as the brick church tower. As the isthmus
disappeared at the close of the 17th century, the river continued to
erode the island headward and build it up at its downstream end, so that
the western and southern shores where the first settlement had been
built, were partly destroyed. Thus, the first fort site of 1607, of
which no trace has been found on land, is thought to have been eaten
away, together with the old powder magazine and much early 17th-century
property fronting on the river.

In a series of extensive tests for any possible trace of the 1607 fort
still remaining on land, several incidental discoveries of importance
were made. One was an Indian occupation site beneath a layer of early
17th-century humus, which, in turn, was covered by the earthen rampart
of a Confederate fort of 1861. This location is marked today by a
permanent "in-place" exhibit on the shore near the old church tower.
Here, in a cut-away earth section revealing soil zones from the present
to the undisturbed clay, evidence of 350 years of history fades away
into prehistory.

Within the enclosure of this same Confederate fort was found a
miraculously preserved pocket of 17th-century debris marking the site of
the earliest known armorer's forge in British America.

Just beyond, upriver, lie ruins of the Ludwell House and the Third and
Fourth Statehouses. In 1900-01, Col. Samuel H. Yonge, a U.S. Army
Engineer and a keen student of Jamestown history, uncovered and capped
these foundations after building the original seawall. A strange
discovery was made here in 1955 while the foundations were being
examined by archeologists for measured drawings. Tests showed that no
less than 70 human burials lay beneath the statehouse walls, and an
estimated 200 more remain undisturbed beneath the remaining structures
or have been lost in the James River. Here may be the earliest cemetery
yet revealed at Jamestown--one so old that it was forgotten by the
1660's when the Third Statehouse was erected. It is, indeed, quite
possible that these burials, some hastily interred without coffins,
could date from the "starving time" of 1609-10, when the settlers strove
to dispose of their dead without disclosing their desperate condition to
the Indians.

[Illustration: JAMESTOWN EXPLORATION TRENCHES OF