Viewing page 67 of 80
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
55 wonder if, after all, that wasn't a pretty good time to be alive and living colonial Virginia. We were enormously impressed with the elegance of the Governor's Palace and by contrast with the hominess of the Raleigh Tavern, where you could all but feel the lure to go therein and settle down to an evening of convivial drinking. On the other hand, we succumbed to a feeling of deep reverence in Bruton Parish Church, which was said to be the oldest Episcopalian church in continuous use in the country. And then there was the Public Gaol complete with its stocks sitting outside for displaying felons to the populace; by contrast, today the felons are coddled and protected from the public eye to try to avoid any cause for some avaricious lawyer suing the city for abusing his client or subjecting him to ridicule which might prevent his getting a fair trial, while his victim is either dead, defrauded or otherwise deprived of something precious to him. Also we inspected the Ludwell-Paradise House whose mere name is enough to sell it to me. And the Wythe House, which served as Gen. George Washington's headquarters preceding the siege of Yorktown. It was a delightful trip that we had to Williamsburg that day and we talked about it and relived it many times watching our movies, often declaring positively that we wanted to return and continue the exploration because some 260 buildings were either restored or rebuilt upon their original foundations. However, as such resolves seem to go sometimes, as far as I can recall, we've never gone back. Too many other places to go that we hadn't seen. On another day, we visited the Yorktown battlefield where had occurred the final decisive battle of the Revolutionary War in October 1781 and on October 19th the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, surrendered. The actual places of this kind where significantly decisive events have occurred seldom fail to thrill me to the point where I choke up and my eyes fill with tears. And so this was a memorable visit for us also and we got pictures of Bab and Rog standing on the base of the monument. Later we went into the village of Yorktown, reasonably unspoiled and with a cannonball still embedded in the brick wall of a small house sitting on one of the narrow streets. It was still a thrill for Willie and me to wander around a historical old town like this much as we used to enjoy doing the same thing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on our trips to the Isles of Shoals. Charlie would join us at home late in the afternoon after having put in his stint at the fort. It was hot and he usually wore what I think would be called light khaki fatigues consisting of shirt and slacks. I don't remember what we would do evenings but I do know we had a very pleasant visit. There was only one untoward incident during the visit. Chick, being an only child, was inclined to be a bit spoiled and even in Erie there had been some minor fracases occasionally. One I recall was the time we were all at the beach and Chick threw
