Thanksgiving in Jamestown

Thanksgiving day, we headed out to Jamestown settlement. This was the first day in quite a while that we had some time to sleep in and have a quiet morning before starting on our busy day.
We decided to head straight for the harbor to see the ships docked in the harbor. They did a very cramped and hard to see demonstration on how the cannons were fired on the ships. Jayden was lucky enough to help out with one of the demos.


Thanksgiving started a food festival with demonstrations in each of the areas of what foods were eaten at the time Jamestown was settled. While on the dock, the kids got to help make wheat biscuits that the sailors took with them on the ship. They had the cooked dried out versions to investigate and they were hard as a rock. I don't think I would want to eat salted pork and rock hard bread!

In the fort, they were butchering a pig. This was quite a shocking thing for my city kids to see! Another girl in the audience announced she can no longer eat pig products after seeing that!

We left the pig demonstration to see the church at the fort, where Jayden loved standing at the pulpit. Just outside the church, workers then demonstrated sword fighting. We visited the artillery room and saw weapons from the time period. The kids also tried on helmets and chest plats. As you will see from the pictures, they all have a lot of growing yet to to do to fit into the samples!


Other activities included hollowing out a log to make a canoe like the one the kids are sitting in in this picture. The colonists would make a fire in the log, then use sea shells to scrape out the ashes till the log was hollowed out. What a messy, long process!


In the Indian village, we saw traditional houses, tools of the time, and once again, they were demonstrating foods of the time. They were butchering a deer hunted that morning using sharpened shells. Jordan and Kelsey enjoyed playing the Indian game of throwing a corn husk with a feather in the back of it through a hoop hanging from the trees. Jayden tried his hand at making leather, by scraping the fur off a a hide stretched out on a canvas.

After leaving Jamestown, we headed out to find a place to eat our Thanksgiving dinner. We decided on Cracker Barrel. They were serving a traditional meal with all the fixings. It wasn't our normal home cooked meal, but it was great to have a taste of Thanksgiving, anyway!