Jamestown to Philadelphia, the country before it was one

In May 1607, three ships carrying a little over a hundred English settlers reached a marshy peninsula on the James River in Virginia and founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. It survived disease, famine and conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy that already occupied the land, and it did not thrive so much as endure, but it endured long enough to matter. Almost exactly a hundred and seventy years later, in Philadelphia, delegates from thirteen colonies descended from settlements like it signed a declaration ending English rule altogether. The mid-Atlantic states hold both ends of that story, and a week's travelling through Virginia, Pennsylvania and beyond can trace the distance between them.

Jamestown and the colony it grew into

What survives at Jamestown today is mostly archaeological rather than architectural: the site of the original fort, excavated and reinterpreted over the past few decades, alongside reconstructions that give a sense of the settlement's early, precarious years. The colony that grew out of it moved its capital inland to Williamsburg in 1699, and it is Williamsburg, restored to its eighteenth-century appearance through a long twentieth-century preservation effort, that shows what colonial Virginia actually looked like at its most established: a functioning capital with a governor's palace, a legislative building and streets of shops and taverns, all rebuilt or restored to their period condition.

Monticello, and the contradictions built into it

A short drive inland, Monticello, the home Thomas Jefferson designed and lived in near Charlottesville, is one of the clearer illustrations of the era's contradictions: an author of the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "all men are created equal," who enslaved more than six hundred people over his lifetime and freed only a handful. The house itself, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is worth visiting for its architecture and Jefferson's own inventive, occasionally eccentric design choices; the story told alongside it, of the enslaved households who built and ran the estate, is now a deliberate and necessary part of the tour rather than a footnote to it.

Philadelphia, where it was decided

Philadelphia was, briefly, the most important city in the colonies: the site of the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and later the drafting of the Constitution, all conducted within what is now Independence Hall. The Liberty Bell, cracked and no longer rung, sits nearby, and the surrounding historic district preserves enough of the eighteenth-century street pattern to make the walk between the two feel like a reasonably direct route through the period itself.

Most routes through this history now begin, in practice, in Washington DC, a city that did not exist when any of the events above took place. It was purpose-built after independence, on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia specifically because no existing city, Philadelphia or New York among them, could be agreed on as capital without favouring one region over another. Laid out from 1791 according to a formal plan of broad avenues radiating from the Capitol, it remains a monument to the compromises the new country had to keep making even after independence was won.

The route, and where it diverges

Both operators covering this ground follow a broadly similar line from Washington DC through Virginia and up to Philadelphia and New York, but the details differ. The America's Historic East tour, run by Travelsphere, adds a stop at Gettysburg, the site of the pivotal 1863 Civil War battle and Lincoln's address there four months later, folding the country's near-collapse a century after independence into the same itinerary as its founding. Just You's America's Historic Trail stays closer to the eighteenth century throughout, running via Charlottesville, Williamsburg and Jamestown to Philadelphia, with an optional extension into New York for those who want the story carried a little further forward.

Travelling it at the right time

Spring and early autumn suit this route better than midsummer, when Washington and the Virginia lowlands can turn uncomfortably hot and humid; April through June and September into October offer milder, more comfortable conditions for the amount of walking a route like this involves.