Everything We Know About The United States' Oldest Surviving Tombstone Located In Virginia

The tombstone is imposing. The slab of black limestone is almost six feet long and three feet wide and weighs in at nearly 1,000 pounds. With these stats perhaps it's not so strange that it's been around for more than 400 years, making it the oldest known surviving tombstone in the United States. Known as the Knight's Tombstone for its carved knight and shield, it's been attributed to Sir George Yeardley, a Colonial Governor of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Until recently, not that much was known about the Knight's Tombstone, though archeologists say it was originally inlaid as a memorial in the floor of a Jamestown church in 1627, but new research has discovered its origins. The stone most likely came from a quarry in Belgium, then went to London, England, to be carved and have brass inlays attached (that are no longer there) before being shipped across the Atlantic to Virginia. "Little did we realize that colonists were ordering black marble tombstones from Belgium like we order items from Amazon, just a lot slower," Marcus M. Key, co-author of the study "Sourcing the Early Colonial Knight's Black 'Marble' Tombstone at Jamestown, Virginia, USA" told Phys.org. The method the researchers used to accomplish this goal involved studying the tiny fossils embedded in the stone to help pinpoint where it came from.

George Yeardley first arrived in Jamestown in May 1610 after being shipwrecked for nine months in Bermuda due to a hurricane. When he landed, there were just 60 colonists out of 500 still alive. They had just suffered through "the starving time" that saw 88% of the population die, a number so large historians have had a hard time figuring out exactly how it happened. This is one of many unsolved mysteries of Colonial America. It got so bad that winter, some colonists resorted to cannibalism to stave off starvation, just a part of the tragedy of the Jamestown Settlement. Once at Jamestown, Yeardley would quickly rise to a position of power.

After serving in various roles at Jamestown he returned to England in 1617. The Crown knighted him and made him lord governor of Virginia the next fall. By 1619 he was back at Jamestown. He retired from the position in 1621 and died six years later at around age 40. At the time of his death, he was one of Virginia's wealthiest inhabitants and held the dubious distinction of being one of America's first enslavers after purchasing enslaved Africans not long after his arrival in Jamestown as lord governor.

Sir George Yeardley's tombstone would have cost a small fortune, not just because of the stone itself, or the carvings and brass inlays, but rather because he had it shipped all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from England. Having an impressive tombstone would have been important to someone like Yeardley, no matter the expense, so he could set himself apart from the average colonist who would have typically been buried underneath a simple wooden marker. "For colonists like Yeardley, a black marble ledger stone not only commemorated his accomplishments and virtues but boldly proclaimed his family's elite position in colonial life," the researchers wrote (via Springer.com).

Yeardley's tombstone took another journey following its arrival in Jamestown. After his death in 1627, his family buried him inside the colony's second church in Jamestown — built a decade earlier. Then, sometime in the 1640s, workers moved the tombstone (but not Yeardley) during the construction of another church on the site of the older one. Yeardley's gravestone was lost until 1901 when excavators rediscovered it. After conservators repaired the tombstone in 2010, it now resides inside the Jamestown Memorial Church. We now know about the long journey the gravestone most likely took from Belgium to England to Virginia thanks to 340-million-year-old microscopic fossils the researchers were able to pin down as being from the Northwestern European country.