Armed with these objectives,
our field trip took us to three locations and lasted the
entire school day.
First, we visited Slash Church
(b. 1729), the oldest wooden clapboard church in Virginia,
where an elder taught us about the role of the Anglican
Church in colonial times. He also tried to impress on the
history students how the church was paid for, i.e., with
so-many thousands of pounds of tobacco.
Second, we visited the Hanover
Court House area, with its complex of colonial-era and early-American
buildings. We took tours of the Court House of 1735, where
the "Voice of the Revolution" Patrick Henry practiced
law, then the old stone jail (1790?), and finally Hanover
Tavern. Here, the students got lessons on the restoration
of a colonial building —how to "repoint"
colonial mortar and to replace brick, making and replacing
plaster on the walls, etc.
Third, we dug on the Broaddus
Flats site (44Hn254), which is a multi-component dig site,
with distinct evidence of human occupation from the Early
Archaic Period (ca. 9,000 years ago) into the Late Woodland
and Contact periods (ca. 15th – 17th centuries A.D.)
including one short episode of Anglo-Colonial occupation
from ca. 1690 – 1750. The site’s prime location
on the "upper freshes of the Pamunkey River" and
on a ten-year flood plain have made it an excellent site
for humans to carry out life’s necessary activities,
i.e., hunting, farming, commerce, and raising and defending
a family. Lessons out here were geared to cover all aspects
of colonial home life, including indentured servitude and
slavery.
What a day!
I gave the students quite
a few choices for their project they had to do as a follow-up
to our field trip. Some of these included
