Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/233

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thirteen miles distant from Williamsburg. This place, which once had a very great trade with Glasgow and London, but which was never more than a village of a few hundred inhabitants, may, nevertheless, claim to be the beginning and ending of Colonial resistance. Towering on the river bank is the beautiful monument, erected in 1881, which tells that there Lord Cornwallis surrendered in 1781 the British power in America to George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the American armies. But another monument might stand in close proximity, with this inscription, that there the first meeting of the people of Virginia was held in 1635 under the leadership of Nicholas Martian, an ancestor of Washington, to protest against the tyranny of the Governor, Sir John Harvey, who was shortly after deposed and sent a prisoner to England in the custody of two members of the Assembly. Nor, in referring to this neighborhood, must I omit mention of Hampton at the extreme end of the Peninsula, which is the oldest town in English America, which boasts the oldest free school, and which, twice a victim to the flames of war, gave its name to the great landlocked haven where the Merrimac