Belgian connection for Jamestown (Virginia)

The oldest known tombstone in the US originally came from Belgium, new research has shown.

The polished black stone, now with missing inlays, marked the grave of a knight who had lived in Jamestown (Virginia), the first English settlement in America.  It was first put in place in 1627, where it remained until the 1640s when the church’s southern entrance was built.

Broken by the time it was rediscovered in 1907, the slab has been repaired and relocated to the chancel of the present-day Memorial Church.

Apart from the gravestone’s obvious cost and its owner’s presumed wealth, the shape of the missing inlays suggested a shield – possibly bearing a family crest – an unfurled scroll, and a figure standing on a pedestal, which would have included an inscription.

Of the two knights who died in Jamestown in the 17th century, one was Sir Thomas West, Virginia’s first resident governor, who died in 1618 while crossing the Atlantic to Jamestown.

The second was Sir George Yeardley, who was born in Southwark in 1587 and reached Jamestown in 1610 after surviving a shipwreck near Bermuda.  Knighted on going back to England in 1617, he was appointed Governor of Virginia in 1618 and returned to Jamestown where he held this post until 1621.  He resumed the post in 1626 and died in 1627.

The tombstone has been examined and analysed countless times but Professor Markus M Key and Rebecca K Rossi embarked on a new study whose findings were published recently in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

They wished to determine the origin of the black polished limestone, commonly mis-termed “marble” that was used for the Jamestown knight’s tomb.

What they discovered was unexpected, Professor Key said.

He explained that he has spent the last 10 years determining the provenance of stone artifacts by identifying fossils they contained.

“Due to the evolutionary process, biological species are much more unique through time and space than chemical elements or isotopic ratios,” he said.

The Yeardley tomb’s microfossils indicated that the tombstone came from either Ireland or Belgium, as they belonged to species never found North America.

Historical evidence suggested Belgium as the likely source, as it has been most common source of black “marble” since Roman times until the present.

“It was particularly popular among the wealthy in England during Yeardley’s life,” the professor said.

“Little did we realize that colonists were ordering tombstones from Belgium like we order items from Amazon, just a lot slower.”