17th Century

Ten years ago, Ruth and Frances Brown willed their 300-year-old family farm to the Howard County Conservancy. The sisters, who had been schoolteachers in the area, wanted Mount Pleasant preserved and used for outdoor education. This week, in keeping with the Browns' vision, the conservancy formalized a partnership with Howard County public schools. During a reception on the porch of the original farmhouse, conservancy President J. Edward Tillman said, "We think the Brown sisters, who were teachers, would be very happy to see us in this mode."

WHEN THE SEVEN astronauts stepped aboard the space shuttle Columbia, they saw themselves - or at least America saw them - as carrying on a tradition that began when the first human walked out of Africa looking for new lands, that continued when Christopher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, when Roald Amundsen urged his dogs across Antarctica. It is the tradition of exploration that, whether or not it is a fundamental human impulse or a choice of certain cultures, is certainly a part of the American experience.

HAMPTON, Va. - Jamestown archaeologists have received some 21st-century help from NASA Langley Research Center as they try to identify several masses of heavily corroded iron recovered from an early 17th-century well. Using a powerful X-ray machine at the Nondestructive Evaluation Services Lab, they looked through nearly 400 years of accumulated rust, confirming the discovery of numerous pieces of armor as well as a sword and a gun barrel that might date to the time of Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas.

BEIJING - One morning this spring, a handful of government workers in camouflage fatigues and yellow hard hats marched to No. 99 Full Blossom Lane, mounted the roof of a Buddhist temple dating to the 1600s and began swinging away with pickaxes. For a good 40 minutes, they jammed metal poles into the roof of the temple, like spears into a fallen animal, and flicked away ceramic tiles like cigarette butts. Just before lunch, an official with the city's Cultural Relics Bureau arrived. "Don't knock down any more!"

Wood is everywhere -- orderly piles of clapboards, neat stacks of split rails, ankle-high mats of shaved bark and a couple hundred logs strewn like oversized pick-up sticks about this historic site outside Annapolis. In dappled shade, ax-wielding Russ Steele stands on a log and whacks angled cuts into it, striking no deeper than the blue line, leaving his toes intact. Then, leaning over the log with a broadax, he trims the chipped side into a straight edge. It will take an hour and a half for him to do this on four sides to create a post for what at year's end will be a true-to-the-times replica of the kind of house most people in Maryland lived in three centuries ago. Using replicas of Colonial-era tools, Steele has spent months hand-sawing, hand-splitting, hand-peeling and hand-hewing trees to re-create the "Lord Mayor's Tenement," a 1696 home and grounds, owned -- but probably never lived in -- by the wealthiest man of his day in the London Town seaport.

ST. MARY'S CITY - It is hard to believe today, but 350 years ago - before malaria and shifting political tides ran it into the ground - this tiny settlement was a thriving laboratory for democracy. Now, St. Mary's City, Maryland's first capital, is making a bid to reclaim that status. In an alliance, historic St. Mary's City and adjacent St. Mary's College of Maryland have embarked on a mission to put the Chesapeake Bay village back on the map. The commission that oversees the town's ruins and the college have won state approval for a $65 million expansion that will include new tourist offerings, archaeological offices and college buildings.

ALBANY, N.Y. - On April 10, 1652, a few hundred optimistic souls who harbored a dream of a better life in the New World - a motley assemblage of European nomads, social outcasts, gritty entrepreneurs and adventure-seekers - were granted a grubstake. It grew into a down payment on destiny. With the stroke of a pen, the ancestors of Albany - today the New York state capital - were transformed from indentured servants into free agents. A proclamation was read. The flag of the Rensselaerswijck patroonship, or large estate, was lowered and replaced with the Dutch West India Company's standard.

NEW YORK - The iron shackles still make him uneasy, but they no longer stir up a maelstrom of hate and fury inside him. Oswald Sykes has come to tolerate the shackles because they serve his purpose: To tell the story of the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade. For the last decade, Sykes has doggedly called attention to the shackles and other excavated remains of the Henrietta Marie, a 17th-century English slave ship that sank during a storm in the Florida Straits in 1700. Sykes designed an underwater memorial to honor those long-forgotten slaves, and was one of a group of black scuba divers who placed it at the site of the shipwreck in 1993.

Four centuries' worth of chamber music can be sampled this week: * The most recent repertoire will be heard today, as members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra present another of their diverse "Chamber Music by Candlelight" programs. Bartok's String Quartet No. 1 and Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds will be featured, along with pieces by Mendelssohn and C.P.E. Bach. Performers include flutist Elizabeth Rowe, oboist Jane Marvine, clarinetist William Jenken, cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski and the Atlantic String Quartet.

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.