Blockhouses Near Jamestown

WT-3

In the first few years of the English settlement at Jamestown, colonists built small, isolated, fortified structures—called blockhouses—around the perimeter of the main settlement to provide refuges, observation posts, and rallying points in the case of attack. On 29 Mar. 1611, Paspahegh Indians, who consistently resisted the English incursion into their territory, attacked the blockhouse near here, killing the soldiers stationed there. The attack was in retaliation for the Feb. killing of their leader Wowinchapuncke. On 20 May 1611, Sir Thomas Dale directed the raising of another blockhouse “on the north side of our back river to prevent the Indians from killing our cattle.”

Department of Historic Resources, 2011

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Edward Wright Haile, ed., Jamestown Narratives—Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony—The First Decade: 1607-1617 (Roundhouse: Champlain, VA, 1998); Charles E. Hatch, Jr., The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607-1624 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1957); James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Ron Givens, “A Lost Jamestown Suburb Surfaces,” American History Magazine (February 2010); William M. Kelso, Jamestown: The Buried Truth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Ivor Noel Hume and Audrey Noel Hume, The Archaeology of Martin’s Hundred: Part 1: Interpretive Studies (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2001); Alain Charles Outlaw, Governor’s Land: Archaeology of Early Seventeenth-Century Virginia Settlements (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990); Richard W. Stephenson and Marianne M. McKee, eds., Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000)