400th Anniversary of Jamestown, Virginia

April 23-24, 2007, Jamestown, Virginia
Contact: Washington Foreign Press Center Program Officer Sheila Hoban
Telephone: 202-504-6314; Email: hobansm@state.gov

The 400th anniversary of the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent, was commemorated by a year long series of historic and cultural events at Historic Jamestown and the Jamestown Settlement.  Fourteen journalists previewed the "World of 1607," a new exhibit that places the colony in a global context and portrays a larger world of discovery, strife, expansion and cultural exchange.

The group met with Bill Kelso, the archaelogist who located Jamestown and the Jamestown Fort which was long believed to be lost to the waters of the James River.  Curators, historians, and pit archaeologists gave enthusiastic interviews to the FPC journalists and while there, archaeologists found an ivory chess piece fromt he bottom of a well at the deepest level of the dig inside the Fort.  Of particular interest was new research which identified Dr. Fleischer, a German scientist, who is thought to have been on the initial vessel as well as expanded research on early German and Polish glassmakers.