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Virginia Quarters – Quadricentennial CommemorativesThe Virginia Quarters introduce Americans to a word rarely heard in a domestic context: “Quadricentennial”. It refers to the celebration of an event that happened four hundred years in the past. In the United States, little remains from the seventeenth century.This is somewhat less the case in the State of… no wait – The Commonwealth… The Commonwealth of Virginia. (Remember, as we learned with the Pennsylvania Quarters, a “Commonwealth” is a government of laws agreed to and for the benefit of all the people.) Jamestown Virginia is celebrating, in 2007, the 400th anniversary of its founding. It was, in fact, the first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States. The Jamestown of 1607 was a small settlement, contained within the palisades of a triangular fortification. It had been assumed until recently that the precise location of the wood and earthen walls of this fort had long been submerged under changing course of the James River. Modern research suggests that this may not have been the case, as the colonists were found to prefer a less exposed location for the settlement than a shoreline location would afford. Following this lead, archaeologists have definitively fixed the location of the Jamestown settlement at a point somewhat inland of the 1607 shoreline. It is a shoreline location now, however. The site is a popular destination for tourists, especially during the summer months. It is within easy distance of Williamsburg, the restored town of greater sophistication befitting a colonial capital of a century later. Visitors to Jamestown will enjoy seeing replicas of the small ships that brought the first colonists to America. Appropriately, these three ships – The Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery – are the primary design element of the Virginia Quarters design. The coin is the tenth coin of the 50 State Quarters series, acknowledging Virginia as the tenth state to ratify the US Constitution.
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