Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Yorktown

Yorktown is where one of the decisive battles of the revolution was fought. Here's the battlefield.

We walked around the battle field, to the point where Isaac was begging to go into the museum....So there's one way to get a kid to want to go to a museum is drag them around the hot humid heat of the South and then they'll so enjoy the airconditioning of the museum.
At the Victory Center at Yorktown they had a camp replicating what might have been.
They displayed all the current medical instruments and gave a talk about what people knew about germ theory (nothing) and how doctors of the time treated the ill and injured...just be very very glad you're alive now!

Officer's tent
Commander's tent
They enlisted Jake to help load the cannon

This small cannon is what won the battle. They were able to lob bombs over the enemy's barricade rather then the traditional method of breaking through the barricade. The siege at Yorktown lasted 10 days rather then the usual 30-40 days.


2 comments:

Teresa said...

Okay, I have totally felt like I went on this trip with you!! I LOVE it!! Thanks for all the detail. We LOVE history ourselves and can't wait to do all of this when our kiddos are a little bit older...probably on our 1 year RV trip.

So cool that you got to actually go inside those tents!!

Rock Chef said...

Wow. That is all I can say. Wow. I really wish we treated our battlefields with such respect - they keep trying to put motorways and houses on ours!

Love the surgeon's tent. There were men who chose to die rather than go there!