Blockhouses Near Jamestown

In the first few years of the English settlement at Jamestown, colonists built small, isolated, fortified structures—called blockhouses—around the perimeter of the main settlement to provide refuges, observation posts, and rallying points in the case of attack. On 29 Mar. 1611, Paspahegh Indians, who consistently resisted the English incursion into their territory, attacked the blockhouse near here, killing the soldiers stationed there. The attack was in retaliation for the Feb. killing of their leader Wowinchapuncke. On 20 May 1611, Sir Thomas Dale directed the raising of another blockhouse “on the north side of our back river to prevent the Indians from killing our cattle.”