Route: Washington DC → Mount Vernon → Fredericksburg → Williamsburg → Yorktown. Total mileage: 190. Nonstop driving time: 4 hours.
The national capital was not established until seven years after the end of the war, but it´s home to many revolutionary-era artifacts, including the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, preserved at the National Archives (and where a new immersive multimedia museum opened in 2025), and various other artifacts and exhibits at the National Museum of American History. Then cross the Potomac River to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s plantation home, where the complexities of leadership, agriculture, and early American society come into view. Continue south through Fredericksburg — Washington’s boyhood town — and on to Colonial Williamsburg, the restored 18th-century capital of Virginia now run as a living history museum, where Patrick Henry’s call for liberty still echoes in recreated House of Burgesses (nearby, also explore recreated Jamestown, the first permanent 17th-century British settlement in the Americas). The road ends at Yorktown Battlefield, where British general Cornwallis surrendered in 1781 (and site of occasional re-enactments, pictured here, such as the Yorktown Victory Celebration this coming October 17-18). The countryside unfolds in broad rivers, tidal marshes, and pine forests, landscapes that once carried tobacco to Atlantic markets and framed the final act of the war. Along the way, the Colonial Parkway offers a traffic-free stretch of beautiful scenery. (And if you have the time, after Yorktown it´s well worth a two-hour drive to Monticello, the Charlottesville estate of another Founding Father and president, Thomas Jefferson.)
Read more in my post 5 Revolutionary Road Trips to Mark the USA´s 250th Anniversary.
Comments