A Royal Return to Jamestown

Her arrival from Canada was a taste of what was coming. Ten thousand people met her at Patrick Henry airport -- now Newport News/Williamsburg International. Thirty thousand more would greet in her Williamsburg.

She was described by reporters as "lovely" and her prince as "rangy." She was "a magnificent girl," said the wife of Virginia's governor at the time, Thomas B. Stanley. "She does everything so well."

It was noted that the queen brought her own tea.

In Colonial Williamsburg, sedatives were given to the horses pulling her carriage to make sure they behaved, and the steeds were shod with rubber-soled shoes to make sure they didn't falter.

Oscar Gardner, 84, a retired Colonial Williamsburg police sergeant, walked beside the queen's carriage that day with three other police officers.

"She was a very beautiful lady," he recalled last week. Everything went well, but he did not get to shake her hand. "We didn't put our hands on her at all," he said.

In a short speech, the young queen spoke of the cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in the search for "a just and lasting peace for mankind."

But just outside the boundaries of the racially integrated Colonial Williamsburg historic site, justice was limited, recalled Hubert Alexander, 82, then the site's supervisor of restaurants, who helped serve the queen food that day.

Williamsburg was segregated. The schools. The bus station. The train station. The restaurants. Everything, Alexander said: "It was a completely Southern town."

And it was 1957.