Jamestown Settlement

JAMESTOWN, VA. My daughter, Isabelle, loves great stories -- especially the ones that are full of gloom. Her favorite movie scene is from Cinderella, when the main character's stepsisters rip apart her lovely pink dress just before the ball, followed closely by one from The Little Mermaid, when Ariel despairs after her father destroys all the knick-knacks the young mermaid collected from the forbidden human world.

Come fly your kite in the fields at Gunston Hall Plantation in Lorton, Va., next Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Family Kite Festival, an annual March event at the plantation, is held for kite lovers of all ages, and young people through grade 12 will be admitted free of charge. Simple kites can be purchased in the museum shop.Gunston Hall was built in 1755 by George Mason, author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and a framer of the Constitution. At the time, the estate contained over 5,000 acres.

One of America's earliest communal societies, the Ephrata Cloister, was founded in Ephrata, Pa., by Conrad Beissel in 1732. On March 1, Beissel's 300th birthday will be marked at the cloister by a day of special activities, launching a yearlong celebration.Beissel was born in 1691 in Eberbach, Germany, the son of a local baker. He became a Pietist (member of a 17th century religious movement that originated in Germany, stressing revitalized evangelical Christianity). With his followers he separated from the Dunkard Church, came to this country and established a radical religious communal society in Pennsylvania.

The holiday season is upon us. Why stay in this Christmas when there's so much to do? Quit roasting chestnuts and get old Jack Frost off your nose. Bundle up, pack your overnight bag and take a quick trip. We've found some of the best places in and around Maryland to tour, learn, shop, eat, play and more. Maryland Winterfest of Lights, through Jan.1, Ocean City . Board the Winterfest Express train and join in song with Christmas carols, while passing by spectacular lighted displays.

JAMESTOWN ISLAND, Va. -- Until recently, the first fort at the Jamestown settlement was believed to be lost forever, its secrets washed into the nearby James River. That's what the history books said.William Kelso, visiting Jamestown more than three decades ago as a 21-year-old history graduate student, didn't want to accept that. And so, many years later, he found soil stains where oak and walnut posts once formed the walls of the original 1607 triangular fort at the western tip of Jamestown.

A yellowed letter, believed to be the first account of Maryland's founding in 1634, has been acquired by the Maryland Historical Society.Although unsigned and undated, the 12-page letter, handwritten in Latin, is believed to be the work of a Jesuit priest, Father Andrew White, who sailed aboard the Ark in 1633 with Maryland's first settlers and founded Catholicism in English America.Titled "Relatio itineris in Marilandiam" (A brief relation of the voyage unto Maryland), it describes the settlers' stormy voyage to the Potomac River and their first encounters with the Yaocomico Indians.

Nearly half a million twinkling lights are still to be hung, and 20 naked rooms await lavish Victorian trimmings. Wheelbarrows full poinsettias will arrive for arranging, and wicker baskets have to be filled with bundles of frosted sugar cookies. Lace-trimmed velvet costumes need cleaning, and hundreds of candlesticks must be polished.Luckily this isn't your "to do" list for the holidays, which means you can enjoy the results all the more. Instead, all this hard work is being done in towns around the region as they primp and prepare for the season.

When they found her, they thought she'd fallen asleep on the trash pit, but on closer inspection it was obvious she'd been partially scalped, and had pulled herself into the pit -- presumably to hide -- and bled to death. The archaeologists called her "Granny" because she'd lost her lower molars. In fact, she was only 40 years old and one of the 78 people -- out of a population of 140 -- who died in the Indian attack that March day in 1622, on Martin's Hundred, one of the earliest English settlements in the New World.

In Chesapeake City, a barbershop quartet practices its notes. The scents of a holiday feast and homemade cookies waft through the air at Gunston Hall Plantation in Virginia, while cannons and bayonets are dusted and shined in Williamsburg. A log-house settlement in Salem, W. Va., prepares for a Scottish-Irish and German holiday. Meanwhile, Philadelphia's Hard Rock Cafe prepares for a jolly visit, and Peter Pan readies his big show in Odessa, Del.The holidays are coming and with them a flock of regional festivities.

Savage Kingdom The Jamestown Project By Karen Ordahl Kupperman Belknap/Harvard University Press / 380 pages / $29.95 The enterprise was nearly dead. It was 1608, and the Virginia Company, formed two years before in the hope that America might produce riches enough to replenish King James I's coffers and even provide a new route to the South Seas, had to face the fact that its Jamestown project was failing. The first settlers, diseased and dying, had turned on one another. Without a working well, they had to drink salt water, which contributed to fatal illnesses like the vividly named "bloody flux."