by Jim Noles
For the dangerous transatlantic voyage to Virginia, the expedition could count on the leadership of the famed privateer Christopher Newport, commander of a modest fleet that consisted of the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery. At 116 feet in length, the Susan Constant was the largest and carried seventy-one sailors and colonists. The Godspeed, crewed by thirteen sailors and carrying thirty-nine colonists, was a smaller ship, at only sixty-eight feet in length. The brigantine’s usable deck space was really only fifteen feet wide and fifty-four feet long. The pinnace Discovery, crowded with twenty-one men, was even tinier.
Newport’s three ships left London on December 20, 1606. Five months later, they reached Virginia. For his new settlement, Wing-field picked a site on a marshy peninsula along the James River. The colonists—minus an unfortunate comrade (one of the expedition’s “gentlemen”) who had died of dehydration on a hunting expedition on a Caribbean island—disembarked on May 14, 1607, and on a modest spot so unassuming that even the local Indians scorned it, they founded Jamestown.
Although Jamestown was destined to become the first successful English settlement in North America, such success seemed far from certain. Two weeks after the colonists landed, an Indian attack nearly overwhelmed the nascent settlement and encouraged the hasty construction of a rough triangular fort while Newport sailed back to England for more supplies. As the summer wore on, over half of the colonists succumbed to disease and malnutrition. Meanwhile, a second expedition, financed by the Virginia Company of Plymouth and led by George Popham, managed to establish a colony on Maine’s Monhegan Island. Beset by a brutal winter, it lasted barely a year, which perhaps explains why Maine’s state quarter depicts the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse and not George Popham.
Newport returned to Jamestown in January 1608, bringing sixty more colonists, including one man who accidentally burned down most of the settlement with a careless fire. John Smith suffered his share of misfortune as well. Stung by a stingray, he became the first celebrity adventurer in history to suffer that particular fate. Later, burned by an accidental explosion of gunpowder in his canoe, he reluctantly quitted the colony for good in the fall of 1609.
Smith’s departure coincided with the arrival of several hundred more settlers. Bereft of Smith’s sturdy leadership, Jamestown degenerated into a winter known to history as “the starving time.” After gnawing their way through the colony’s horses, dogs, and cats, Jamestown’s inhabitants devoured shoe leather and the starch once intended for the ruffs of their Elizabethan collars. Some sank even lower, resorting to murder and cannibalism. By the spring of 1610, only sixty of Jamestown’s 500 inhabitants were still alive.
Reinforced the following spring, the colony lurched along for another four years, although the Virginia Company never lived up to its investors’ hopes. “Only the name of God,” Price reported, “was more frequently profaned in the streets and market places of London than was the name of Virginia.” The company eventually resorted to holding lotteries to finance its colony and assuage its investors, while in Jamestown, relations with the local Indians deteriorated even further.
Despite such troubles, tobacco offered some hope of the quick riches that had eluded the earlier gold-seeking colonists. In 1614, John Rolfe exported Virginia’s first shipment of tobacco in four barrels. Tobacco exports quickly climbed to nearly 50,000 pounds within four years, although opposition came from an unexpected quarter. Disgusted by his pipe-smoking countrymen but appreciative of the imports’ customs revenues, King James II tried to encourage colonists to plant vineyards and raise silkworms instead. It was an exercise in futility, as a veritable “tobacco rush” took hold in Virginia.
Stoked by such hopes, Jamestown grew to be home to 1,240 settlers by 1622. That spring, however, a massive Indian attack claimed one-third of the colonists. The massacre not only cost the Virginia Company its royal charter—causing Jamestown to revert to being a royal colony—but also launched a decade-long war between the settlers and the Indians. By the time a peace treaty was signed, the English had carved out a formidable foothold in Virginia. Even a second surprise attack in 1644 that killed approximately 450 Englishmen could not dislodge the colony. Instead, it simply sparked a war of reprisal that effectively erased what remained of an Indian nation in eastern Virginia.
Jamestown remained the capital of colonial Virginia for another fifty-five years, until 1699, when the colony moved the capital inland to Williamsburg. Within a generation, the settlement was under private ownership, remaining so for another two centuries before Jamestown became part of a national historic park in 1934. By then, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery were surely little more than barnacle-encrusted fragments of wood resting on an anonymous patch of riverbank or seabed.
Regardless of the ignominy of their final resting places, Newport’s modest fleet sailed once more on October 16, 2000, across the reverse of Virginia’s state quarter. Perhaps the ghost of the old privateer, still appreciative of a good haul of booty, might take some satisfaction in knowing that almost 1.595 billion of those state quarters were minted, thus making it the largest minting of a state’s quarters to date.
That minting represented the culmination of a selection process that began with Governor James Gilmore III’s solicitation of ideas from colleges, universities, museums, and state agencies. He garnered an overwhelming public response that numbered in the thousands and included such suggestions as Mount Vernon and the colonial capital of Williamsburg. Assisted by representatives from the Library of Virginia, the Department of Historic Resources, the Virginia Tourism Corporation, and the Department of General Services, Virginia’s governor selected a collection of final design concepts and forwarded his final recommendation—the Jamestown Quadricentennial—to the U.S. Mint.
Fittingly, the quarter’s launch ceremony took place at Jamestown, heralded by the boom of ten cannons firing a historic salute. “These coins will circulate throughout the nation for years to come,” Governor Gilmore declared, “and will stand as a symbol to all Americans that the courage and perseverance of our forefathers began here in Jamestown.”
11
NEW YORK
“A Mighty Woman with a Torch”
When the U.S. Mint unveiled the first state quarter of 2001, it became apparent that New York had joined the ranks of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in looking to an iconic statue to do double duty for the state. One might be forgiven for not immediately recognizing Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth or even Concord’s Minuteman. But hardly a soul in the nation—if not the world—would fail to immediately place the Statue of Liberty in New York.
Technically, however, New York was not the statue’s place of birth. Like so many of the immigrants welcomed to America’s shores in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Statue of Liberty—to be precise, the “Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World”—was a child of the Old World, transplanted to the New.
Eager to celebrate the impending centennial of the United States in 1876, patrons in both the United States and France commissioned sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to design a statue to commemorate 100 years of U.S. independence and Franco-American friendship. Conceiving the project as a joint venture, the American patrons committed to build the pedestal, at an approximate cost of $334,000; the French would craft the statue itself and assemble it in the United States, which would cost $250,000.
Fund-raising was easier said than done, and it quickly became apparent that there would be no statue in time for the centennial. In the United States, fund-raising efforts ranged from prizefights and auctions to benefit theatrical events and art exhibitions. On the other side of the Atlantic, fund-raising included, among other tools, a lottery. Embarrassingly, American fund-raising lagged behind even the flagging French efforts.
Responding to the trickle of donations, Joseph Pulitzer used the editorial pages of his newspaper, the World, to fan the dying embers of support for the project. In blistering prose, Pulitzer and his writers not only cr
iticized the rich who had failed to finance the pedestal construction but also the middle class, which seemed content to rely upon the wealthy to provide the funds. Stung into action, America responded with open wallets and purses. The fund-raising crisis had been averted.
Meanwhile, another crisis loomed in France. It became apparent that Bartholdi’s copper colossus would be so massive that a number of structural engineering issues had to be addressed. Accordingly, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, who had also designed the Eiffel Tower, was commissioned to design a massive iron pylon and secondary skeletal framework for Bartholdi’s copper-skinned statue. Thanks to Eiffel’s work, the statue’s plates of copper would be able to move independently yet remain upright.
Bartholdi and Eiffel completed their work in France in July 1884. For the shipment to America, they reduced their creation to 350 individual pieces—including 300 copper plates—packed in 214 crates. The French frigate Isere transported the disassembled statue to New York the following summer, battling heroically through rough seas that nearly sank the vessel. The shipment arrived safely in New York on June 17, 1885.
By then, fund-raising for the granite pedestal was in its final stages. With financing complete that August, pedestal construction commenced on what was then called Bedloe’s Island, within the star-shaped walls of the War of 1812–era fort known as Fort Wood. By the following April, the pedestal was finished and the assembly of the French statue could commence. In less than a year, the statue was completed.
On October 28, 1886, at a ceremony attended by President Grover Cleveland and thousands of spectators, Bartholdi’s creation was unveiled to an eager public. The very magnitude of the project was nothing short of awe-inspiring. At 122 feet, it was the tallest structure in New York at the time. In total, the statue’s steel skeleton weighs 125 tons; its copper sheets add another thirty-one tons to the total. Those same sheets are 3/32 of an inch thick (the thickness of two pennies put together). Because of Eiffel’s flexible design, the statue is able to sway in high winds without danger to the superstructure. Winds of fifty miles per hour cause the statue to sway three inches and its torch five inches.
Elements other than engineering intrigued the crowd, however. Titillating rumors claimed that although Bartholdi had modeled the face of the statue on that of his mother, he had based the statue’s body on that of his mistress. And although the veracity of such rumors remains open to question, the symbolism incorporated throughout the Statue of Liberty is more straightforward.
A set of chains and a broken shackle lie at the statue’s feet, unseen from below but symbolic of the statue being free from oppression and servitude. The seven spikes in its crown stand for the seven continents and seven seas; the twenty-five windows in that crown represent gemstones found on the earth and the heaven’s rays shining over the world. The tablet that the statue holds in her left hand reads (in Roman numerals), “July 4th, 1776.”
For the first fifteen years of its existence, the Statue of Liberty was the responsibility of the United States Lighthouse Board. Then, in 1902, the War Department took charge of the island and the statue. A year later, an important addition to the statue came with the addition of a bronze plaque on the pedestal’s base. On that plaque, visitors can read the famous sonnet “The New Colossus,” composed by New York poet Emma Lazarus. Although its last lines are well known, the poem in its entirety is well worth reading:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!: cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” (Lazarus 2005, 58)
Lazarus penned “The New Colossus” in 1883 in support of one of the pedestal’s fund-raising art auctions. Tragically, she suffered an early death at the age of thirty-eight from Hodgkin’s disease and never saw her poem placed with the statue it commemorated and helped to finance.
Lazarus’s poem was a welcome addition to the statue; a decidedly unwelcome addition came on the night of July 29, 1916, while World War I raged in Europe. Bold German saboteurs detonated an ammunition barge, full of munitions bound for England, moored at nearby Black Tom Island. The resulting explosion peppered the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel, shattered thousands of windows in lower Manhattan, and was reportedly felt twenty-five miles away.
After the Black Tom attack, the torch was permanently closed to visitors. Eight years later, in 1924, a presidential proclamation declared Fort Wood (and the Statue of Liberty within it) a national monument and, in 1933, its care and administration was transferred to the National Park Service.
As the statue’s own centennial approached, it became apparent that a major restoration would be required. In May 1982, President Ronald Reagan turned to Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler Corporation, to head up a private-sector effort to do so. Iacocca proved remarkably successful, raising $86 million for what was, in 1984, designated by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site. The newly restored statue opened to the public on July 5, 1986.
After its restoration, annual park visitation climbed steadily to eventually reach over 5 million. Although the tragedy of September 11, 2001, initially sparked the closure of Liberty Island, it reopened after 100 days. The statue, however, remained closed for almost another two years. Today, visitors have access to the statue’s pedestal observation deck, promenade, museum, and areas of Fort Wood. Access to the crown of the Statue of Liberty and the copper structure itself remains closed.
Because of the 50 State Quarters® Program, however, the Statue of Liberty is as close to a citizen as his or her own pocket, after beating out other semifinalist designs that included a depiction of Henry Hudson and his ship, the Half Moon; a rendering of the historic painting, Battle of Saratoga; and the New York Federal Building.
Governor George Pataki turned to his fellow New Yorkers for input on the final selection. With the Statue of Liberty capturing 76 percent of the vote, he selected it to adorn the reverse of the New York quarter, along with an outline of the state and the phrase “Gateway to Freedom.” The final design was the handiwork of Daniel Carr, a 3-D computer modeler—sometimes called a “virtual sculptor”—from Colorado. At Pataki’s request, however, the U.S. Mint ensured that the Hudson River and the Erie Canal were etched into the coin’s state outline in order to reflect the key role that those waterways played—and continued to play—in the Empire State’s development.
12
NORTH CAROLINA
“Damned if they ain’t flew!”
North Carolina’s state quarter offers an image that transcends state, and even national, history. By depicting the Wright brothers’ historic first flight, the Tar Heel State proudly serves notice that one of mankind’s greatest technological leaps took place on North Carolina soil. The selection of this historic venue belongs in large part to Outer Banks native William J. “Bill” Tate.
In August 1900, Tate was not only an officer in the United States Lighthouse Service but also a respected notary, a Currituck County commissioner, and a former and future postmaster of Kitty Hawk. Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that when a peculiar letter arrived from Dayton, Ohio, addressed to Kitty Hawk’s U.S. Weather Bureau office, the office’s sole employee shared it with Tate.
The letter in question was penned by Wilbur Wright and inquired about local weather conditions with an eye toward testing the Wright brothers’ gliders. For se
veral months, Wilbur and his brother, Orville, had been corresponding with the U.S. Weather Bureau, searching for a location where they could “get dependable winds of 15 mph without rain or too inclement weather, suspecting they are rare. A sandy area is needed.”
Initial responses from the Weather Bureau and the brothers’ mentor, Octave Chanute, had identified likely areas near San Diego, California, or St. James City, Florida, as having “steady sea breeze but no sand hills.” Chanute offered that “perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.” It was likely that Chanute’s suggestion, along with further data collected from the Weather Bureau, led Wilbur to write his letter to Kitty Hawk.
Fortunately for North Carolina’s place in aviation history, Wilbur Wright’s letter found in Tate a man of unusual intellectual curiosity. “As it happened,” Tate remembered years later, “I had read only a few months before an article in a magazine about gliders and the attempts which then were being made by men to fly. I could tell by the tone of the letter that I was dealing with honest-to- goodness flying machine men.”
Joining in with the Weather Bureau employee’s response, Tate wrote to Wilbur, assuring him, “I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience & success & pleasure & I assure you [that] you will find a hospitable people when you come among us.” Tate accompanied his letter with vivid descriptions of Kitty Hawk, including a number of sketches.
