A stroll through history at Virginia's Berkeley Plantation

A place of beginnings and endings, Berkeley Plantation, about halfway between Richmond and Williamsburg, Va., is part of your life. Each time you celebrate Thanksgiving, there's an echo of the first Thanksgiving held here in 1619 (pre-Pilgrim, Berkeley happily reminds us). Each time the solemn notes of taps play at the end of a day or the end of a life, they echo the notes first sounded at Berkeley during the Civil War.

By Katherine Calos

September 16, 2012