1368 Colonial Parkway, Williamsburg. The monument lies within Historic Jamestowne, a fee-based site of historical interpretation.
Unveiled on Jamestown Island in 1907 as part of the 300th anniversary commemoration of Jamestown’s founding, the Tercentennial Monument stands as an obelisk in the vein of the Washington Monument.
It extends 103 feet tall, one foot for each original white colonizer who arrived in 1607. Jamestown Island remains a site of contested histories, with white Virginians centered within a mythologized narrative of white nationhood that often diminishes the histories of others who lived there, notably the Powhatan and enslaved Africans.
As the first meeting site of the elected colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, in 1619, white leaders touted Jamestown as the birthplace of democracy. White Virginians developed the site into a shrine devoted to the story of white nationalism in the nineteenth century. They held four jubilees on the island between 1800-1860. These celebrations curated Jamestown as an honored site where the English first brought the civilizing effects of Christianity to the continent. At these events, participants orated popular fables involving John Smith and paramount chief Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, outlined in terms of how she became “civilized” through her colonial education and Christian conversion.
As an outgrowth of the jubilees, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (AVPA) established a private park on Jamestown island in 1893. In 1916, Virginia State College for Negroes, a historically Black university, led an effort to erect a monument at Jamestown to recognize the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619. The AVPA rejected the request. In 1930, Rev. W.L. Ransome, a Black minister, was denied access to the Jamestown site, as was a Black professor from Virginia Union University along with fifty college seniors from Hampton Institute. In the 1930s, the federal government established a national park at this site. As a result, state officials established Jamestown Festival Park on state land ahead of Jamestown’s 350th anniversary celebration in 1957 in order to strictly limit attendance to white crowds. Had they held events on the island’s federal property, they would have been forced to host an integrated event.
In 2019, president Donald Trump spoke at Jamestown to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the House of Burgesses’ first meeting. Members of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus boycotted the event. Legislator Ibraheem Samirah, whose Jordanian father was prevented from legally entering the country due to a Trump-initiated policy that sought to ban Muslims, interrupted the speech to shout, “you can’t send us back, Virginia is our home.”
These historic points of contestation at Jamestown showcase the ways that powerful white Virginians over centuries have sought to preserve the site as a shrine to white nationhood to the exclusion of all others, exposing deep contradictions within the legacies of U.S. history and its ties to the development of democracy. Black and Indigenous communities have persistently challenged this whitewashing, with varying degrees of success.
To learn more:
- Jacobs, Jack. “Historic Jamestowne Tour Delves into the Story of Repression of Black History at Site.” Virginia Gazette, January 21, 2020.
- Kiracofe, David. “The Jamestown Jubilees: ‘State Patriotism’ and Virginia Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. 110, No. 1 (2002): 35-68.
Image: View inside Historic Jamestowne. Courtesy of Kim Lee Schmidt, 2020.