Mark Summers normally shares untold stories of Jamestown colonists on outdoor walking tours, surrounded by people.
Today, the director of public and youth programs at Historic Jamestowne does the same work at home — alone — as he sits on his front porch or at his dining room table.
With the cultural heritage site shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, Summers is creating mini-documentaries based on his tours, which he posts on his YouTube channel JR Education (for Jamestown Rediscovery). He’s also conducting live video classes for students from his West Point home via Zoom and Skype, starting with a group of fifth-graders in France.
“Distance learning is something that we’d already been looking to develop,” he notes. “By embracing technology now, we can keep changing people’s perspectives on history and showing how Jamestown’s story is part of a much bigger, global story.”
Summers’ first project is a three-part series on the many ties between Jamestown and Plymouth, Mass., which typically compete for “America’s birthplace” rights. He plans to keep each video at less than 10 minutes and incorporate photos, narrative and little-known facts. The videos will be released on Wednesdays, and Summers is referring to the series as “Walking Tour Wednesday.”
Future installments will cover Jamestown’s earliest female settlers and African inhabitants. Historic Jamestowne will highlight new episodes on its Facebook page, and viewers also can subscribe to his YouTube channel.
Summers likes to surprise people by diving into both prominent and little-known historical figures. His initial post, “He that will not work, shall not eat,” focuses on Capt. John Smith and his strong leadership in Jamestown.
Yet while the English soldier is forever linked to Virginia, in reality he was widely disliked for his harsh measures and vainglorious reputation and ultimately favored New England as a settlement site. In fact, Smith coined that region’s name to help it seem more attractive.
During a two-hour virtual class on colonization with 50 students and three teachers from the Lycée International School’s American Section in Paris, Summers again didn’t shy away from the sometimes-unsettling truths revealed by documents, archaeology and artifacts. One extreme example: the evidence of cannibalism during severe famine.
“This was a side of Jamestown our textbooks didn’t cover,” notes Tifany Champouillon, Lower School Teacher at the school. “Behind the myths of early America, history is full of real people in trying circumstances making compromises to survive — much like our story today.”
Champouillon’s fifth-graders, who tuned in from home computers, were fascinated, peppering Summers with questions during a 40-minute post-lecture period. She already plans to reconnect with him for an upcoming unit on the transatlantic slave trade.
For his YouTube videos, Summers handles story boarding, script-writing, and audio and video producing duties. The second segment of “Jamestown vs. Plymouth” covers colonist Stephen Hopkins, a one-time Jamestown resident whose trouble-making ways on the 1620 voyage to Massachusetts helped inspire the Mayflower Compact to maintain social order.
He also plans to introduce viewers to Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold, an explorer who named Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard yet also commanded a ship that traveled to Jamestown in 1607. He died a few months later and is buried in Virginia.
“My overall goal is to show how much we have all been connected, from the very start,” Summers says.
Once his first series is done, Summers has an idea called “Beyond Brideships” to look beyond the several hundred women who arrived in Jamestown in 1620 to be auctioned off as wives. A full decade before that, Summers notes, about 20 percent of Virginia colonists were female.
“Obviously they were part of the success of the colony, but we hardly hear anything about them,” he says. “And if this group of women wasn’t there already, how much harder would it have been for that 1620 group?”
As Summers waits to return to his regular tour duties, he hopes Historic Jamestowne’s embrace of technology will continue indefinitely. For example, he imagines one day talking to students in Lincolnshire, England, where Capt. Smith likely was born.
“How incredible would that be?” he asks. “I would love to take our story there.”
Alison Johnson, ajohnsondp@yahoo.com
