17th Century

As most of us enjoy a sumptuous feast at our own Thanksgiving tables, interpreters at Jamestown Settlement near Williamsburg, Va., re-create a 17th-century feast."

The view of a 16th-century Lisbon street is such a teeming hodgepodge of races, social classes and religions and has so much life on display - much of it mischievous - that's it hard not to smile. Slightly to the right of center, an African man wearing the wide pants of a sailor dances with a stranger. He's trying to embrace a middle-aged white woman carrying a jug, who recoils in surprise. Toward the left, two Jewish policemen - identifiable by their long beards and armbands - support a sheepish-looking black prisoner who appears to be drunk.

"Foods and Feasts in 17th Century Virginia" will be featured Thanksgiving Day through Nov. 30 at Jamestown Settlement, where life in America's first permanent settlement is demonstrated.On Friday a whole hog will be processed at James Fort, and vegetables, bread, meats and desserts will be prepared in traditional 17th century style. Aboard the Susan Constant you can learn about a 17th century seaman's diet. Stews and game birds will be roasted over an open fire at the Powhatan Indian village.

America is a product of the Age of Reason. Our founders used their rational powers to free us from the ignorance and superstition that shackled less enlightened societies. For over two centuries, we have assumed that the Age of Reason was here to stay, a permanent flowering of our intellectual growth. Alas, the anti-planning hysteria in parts of Maryland reveals that the Age of Reason may have been just a phase, one that is ending as we regress to the magical thinking of centuries past.

ST. MARY'S CITY -- Scientists excavating what may be the burial place of Maryland's founding Calvert family said yesterday that the contents of at least two of the crypt's three lead coffins appear to be extremely well-preserved after more than 300 years.The first gamma ray images of the two coffins' contents show apparently well-preserved skulls, with shadows that some scientists suggest may reveal soft tissue, cloth burial shrouds or even hair.The images also clearly reveal the fine wood grain of the interior coffins, an indicator that the lead sheathing has kept the coffins relatively dry and sound.

As regular readers of this column know, I am fascinated by the history of the decorative arts. It is through this kind of study that we gain insights into past civilizations and also pick up some practical pointers for designing our own interior environments.One thing we learn is that interior design did not originate either in the United States or during the 20th century. I find that many people assume that this particular decorative art must be a fairly recent American invention, since our homes are filled with American-made furnishings and gadgets.

The back of my pine chair is round, and when the back is flipped forward, the chair turns into a table. When was it made?Table chairs were introduced in the 17th century. They also were made in the 18th and 19th centuries for use in country houses. They sell for $1,200 to $7,500.My grandparents were from Turkey. When they died, they left me an old doll with a wooden face. It's a man dressed in a native Turkish costume. I think he's made from papier-mache. He is marked "Ertugrul O Zsoy Turk El Isleri Ataturk Bulwari."

ABERDEEN -- In the 1680s, the frontiersman and tobacco merchants of the northern Chesapeake Bay gathered to trade and socialize at a tiny tobacco port on the Bush River. They called it Baltimore Town, the 17th-century seat of Baltimore County's court.Archaeologists digging gingerly amid unexploded munitions at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground say they have found traces of that first Baltimore, a town that vanished decades before the 1729 founding of a new Baltimore, 20 miles to the south on the Patapsco River.

OLD PLANTATION CREEK, Va. -- It must have been a sight -- three stories of brick and mortar towering above the marshes and flat, sandy fields here where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic. In the mid-1670s, a time when even the well-to-do were scratching to make a stake in the Virginia Colony, wealthy planter and tobacco merchant John Custis II outdid his fellow gentry, building a home historians say was the "most magnificent in the Chesapeake" on an isolated spot near the southern tip of Virginia's Eastern Shore.

1851: Howard becomes Howard After being passed back and forth between Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties since the 17th century, the lands now known as Howard County officially became an independent jurisdiction on July 4, 1851. [Source: Maryland State Archives]

Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: GRAVAMEN Terms from law sometimes sidle into the general language. One such is gravamen (pronounced gruh-VAY-men), meaning the most serious part of a complaint or accusation. It derives from the Latin gravis , "heavy," and came into English in the 17th century as an ecclesiastical term for formal presentation of a grievance.

On the day before the 2009 Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage opened, co-chair Hilles Whedbee hosted a luncheon for 70 volunteers at her northern Baltimore County home. She has attended most of the tours this month and on Sunday she will open Shawan House, a Georgian brick colonial that overlooks Western Run Valley, to about 400 visitors. She works full time as a nurse midwife, is planning graduation parties for both of her daughters and is going about sprucing up her home and its spacious grounds without anxiety.

ST. MARY'S CITY -Henry Miller's assignment might have been hopeless. As research director for Historic St. Mary's City, he was expected to guide the reconstruction of the first Roman Catholic house of worship in English America, for which no drawings or even written descriptions have ever been found. All that was left of the 1667 Brick Chapel in Maryland's first Colonial capital were its huge, 3-foot-thick brick foundation and thousands of fragments of glass, lead, brick and plaster sifted from the soil during 20 years of painstaking archaeology.

I was laid up, at home, in forced recuperation and climbing the walls. My mother's close friend, Elizabeth Heinekamp Mitchell, called to say she was doing volunteer duty by chauffeuring aged Sister Mary Clement downtown to do monthly banking for her fellow sisters at the cloistered monastery where she was a member - and arguably its No. 1 character. Elizabeth requested that my mother accompany her. My mother said that there'd be another passenger: her eldest son, then 14.

1851: Howard becomes Howard After being passed back and forth between Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties since the 17th century, the lands now known as Howard County officially became an independent jurisdiction on July 4, 1851. [Source: Maryland State Archives]

When the Rev. John Miles Evans arrived at All Hallows Parish in June 1999, he was surprised to find it was the only one of 30 Episcopal parishes that existed in Maryland in 1692 without a historical marker. "It would have been easy to get one because the other churches all had one, so I wonder if the omission was deliberate," said Evans, 66, who became a priest in 1995. "The church was run for the longest time by a few old families. I think it's a well-kept secret for having such a big place in history."

The rich are moving back into Baltimore City. The poor are still getting out.Congress has abolished the Internal Revenue Service and will replace it with an agency having identical functions bearing the same name.The Northern Irish are mired in the 17th century, which looks ridiculous to us, who are well into the 19th.Roy Rogers is finally Home on the Range.Pub Date: 7/13/98

Al Luckenbach and Jim Gibb are looking for the town that isn't there.The two Anne Arundel County archaeologists spent a recent day tramping through freshly plowed tobacco fields near Deale, and scouting nearby stream banks and hillsides, in search of Herrington -- another of Anne Arundel County's "lost" Colonial towns.Their quarry was that shard of crockery or 17th-century pipe stem that would signal the presence here, more than 300 years ago, of a bay-side hamlet that flickered feebly for a few decades, then vanished.

Argan, the title character of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, is convinced he is a sick man. He is happy among his bottles of medicine and happier still when a doctor or apothecary tells him how ill he is and prescribes a new treatment. He is not only a hypochondriac, but also a cheapskate. As the play opens, he is going over his accounts, disputing the cost of every treatment and consultation. He has arranged to marry off his daughter Angelique to a young physician, the son of Argan's doctor.

Once a week for the past six years, Aurelia Loveman has buried herself in a storage room of the Baltimore Museum of Art, gingerly removing pieces of lace from the boxes, linen envelopes and silk sheets that have concealed them for 55 years. Elegant cuffs and collars that once adorned royalty in the 17th-century court of Louis XIV, delicate Chantilly lace parasol covers, gauzy shawls and intricately woven 19th-century needle-lace fan leafs are among the valuable remnants hiding inside their dusty tombs.