Preserving the historic heritage of the original settlers of the Fort Germanna Colonies in Virginia
Be sure to take a look at the photos taken during the 2017 Germanna Reunion and Conference–
Photos from the Salubria dinner
Fort Germanna Archaeology Dig including the visit to the site by world-renowned archaeologist William Kelso, who discovered Fort Jamestown.
You can see photos of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe 300th anniversary living history encampment at Germanna on our NEW photo gallery site (also found under Resources on the menu). For more information about this event, see our previous blog post.
Germanna Photos
We treated Dr. Bernard Means and his VCU archaeology field school students to a pizza party picnic at the Fort Germanna/Enchanted Castle excavation site on Thursday, July 28th – the final day of VCU’s field work at Germanna this summer. Our seasonal staff, under the direction of Germanna’s archaeologist, Eric Larsen, Ph.D., and this season’s Assistant Field Director Amelia Chisholm, are continuing the search for Fort Germanna, and completing documentation of the 14 units opened up this season over the next 2 weeks. A couple VCU students are going to be coming back and volunteering for a few days too. Check our website later this summer, and
be sure to watch for Eric’s “Field Note
s” column in your next Germanna newsletter, for more details about what we’ve learned, and what we have yet to discover…
Photos from days one and two of the 2015 Germanna Reunion are now online by viewing our Photo Gallery. Have photos of the rest of the days that you would like to add? Please let us know.
The Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, Inc., met with Apollo 11 astronaut and Germanna descendant Buzz Aldrin at the Germanna Community College’s Daniel Technology Center in Culpeper on Friday, November 7th, as he met with students as part of his ShareSpace Foundation’s effort to inspire children to study science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. Buzz is descended from the Germanna colonial Haeger, Rector and Fishback families.
Germanna Foundation President J. Marc Wheat, also a descendant of the families, presented Buzz with a Cat’s Meow piece depicting the Foundation’s Brawdus Martin Visitor Center, the Foundation’s own “command module,” and a copy of Buzz’s genealogy showing his family tree back to the Germanna colony’s founding in 1714. Wheat said, “I was pleased to meet again my moonwalking distant cousin, and I reminded him that his explorer genes can be traced back to those intrepid German ancestors of ours, who – while not traveling as far as the moon – displayed the same questing spirit and the use of the best technologies to plant our civilization on this frontier as he did for us on the moon.”
The Germanna Foundation helped establish Germanna Community College by donating the land for the Locust Grove campus to the Commonwealth of Virginia for the purpose of founding the College in 1969 – the same year that Buzz walked on the moon.
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About the Germanna Foundation: The Germanna Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization with a mission to preserve the early German-American heritage that began in colonial Virginia through lively programs of: (1) Land conservation; (2) Preservation of historic structures, sites, and cemeteries; (3) Education of the general public as well as the tens of thousands of descendants of those early settlers; and (4) Development of strong international relations with counterparts in Germany.
Contact: Steve Hein, Chief Operating Officer
540-423-1700
shein@germanna.org
Click on photos to enlarge. Also see them here.
