Did Jamestown eventually decline because the colonial capital moved to Williamsburg?
Yes, the area reverted to farmland. Jamestown is not really a good deep-water port; there are better ports at Yorktown. So Jamestown didn’t disappear because it failed, but because the American experiment it started grew so successful. That’s my point. The Virginia Company, the colony’s sponsors, failed, so everyone concludes that Jamestown failed. But it didn’t. By the time the Pilgrims step on Plymouth Rock in 1620, there were over a thousand people living up and down the James River on various prosperous plantations. And the ideas of Jamestown, that legacy, moved to Williamsburg, and then to Richmond. And the site of James Fort even has a second history after that. As a Confederate fort. Again, this was the most defensible position in the area. In fact, the Confederates used Jamestown’s surviving church steeple as an observation tower. Their fort was earthen walls. Today, those walls are full of Jamestown artifacts. Did the Confederates know that? Oh, yes. Their journals record find
