by GRACE VERHEY

America turns 400 next month, and Virginia is throwing a big bash for the occasion.

If you’re not one of those tour book-toting, history documentary-watching types, you may be wondering: Why all the hype? What’s so special about a soggy strip of marshland in Virginia where a motley crew of English colonists in 1607 founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America?

Well, you’ll never know unless you take the time to explore Jamestown first hand. And what better occasion to make the trip than anniversary weekend from May 11-13 at Jamestown’s Anniversary Park in the Jamestown-Williamsburg-Yorktown historic triangle.

Virginia has every cultural and financial incentive to make a big deal out of the 400th anniversary. Organizers say they hope to attract 90,000 visitors for anniversary weekend, the capstone of an 18-month commemoration that began in May 2006 and continues through next year.

Organizers announced last week that President Bush will attend the event. England’s Queen Elizabeth II will also pay a visit. The queen, who just turned 81, also attended the 1957 Jamestown Festival in honor of America’s 350th.

This year’s anniversary weekend festivities will include all things American: golf, fireworks, a beer garden and music by R&B star Chaka Kahn. But the best part about visiting Jamestown is the chance to experience America’s birth on the very ground where it happened.

At the Historic Jamestowne national park site on Jamestown Island, visitors can wander along the James River to the spot where settlers built the triangle-shaped fort and first encountered local Virginia Indians.

If archaeology is your thing, you can explore the newly opened Archaearium museum or watch staff from the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological dig unearth portions of the original 1607 fort.

Two new state-of-the-art museums give visitors an in-depth look into the English, Virginia Indian and African cultures that shaped early Jamestown.

The Jamestown Settlement, run by the state of Virginia, sits just upstream from Historic Jamestowne. The Settlement boasts a 30,000-square-foot interpretive museum with life-size dioramas and high-tech multimedia presentations that will satisfy school children, history buffs and casual visitors alike.

For those who want to step back in time, the settlement has re-created the Jamestown Fort and a Virginia Indian village where visitors can chat with costumed living-history interpreters. Docked in the settlement’s harbor are full-size models of the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, ships that brought Jamestown’s first colonists across the Atlantic to the New World.

If you visit Jamestown, you may discover that John Smith and Pocahontas aren’t who you thought they were (Hint: They never had a passionate love affair as Disney and Hollywood would have us believe). Lesser-known but fascinating characters, such as Opechancanough, Sir Thomas Dale and John Rolfe, may pique your interest, too.

When you get home, you may just start watching those history documentaries after all.