Colonial Williamsburg's Half Population

Colonial Williamsburg in the eighteenth century was a small city of roughly two thousand people. At any given time in the colonial period, approximately half of them were enslaved. They worked in the taverns and the Governor's Palace and the private homes and the craft shops. They built and repaired the buildings. They cooked the food that the colonial government's representatives ate at the tables of the great houses. Half the town, and for most of the twentieth century, the restored Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area barely acknowledged they had been there.

The living-history museum that the Rockefeller family began funding in nineteen twenty-six set out to restore colonial Williamsburg to its eighteenth-century appearance. What the restoration initially told was the English political story: the burgesses, the governors, the revolutionary pamphlets, the road to independence. The enslaved half of the colonial population appeared, when they appeared at all, as background figures or domestic props.

That interpretation began changing around nineteen eighty when Colonial Williamsburg added its first dedicated African American history programming. The change was not sudden and not without resistance. For decades the expansion of enslaved people's narratives into the interpretive program was contested internally, with arguments about whether visitors came to see colonial history as it was or as it should have been remembered. The answer the foundation eventually arrived at was that those are not different things.

Today the foundation employs historians and interpreters who present the lives of specific enslaved people as primary stories, not background detail. The names are in the record: Gowan Pamphlet, an enslaved man who founded one of the first Baptist churches in colonial Virginia. Eve, an enslaved woman noted in the records for her skill at small-pox inoculation. The work of documenting who specifically was in that town and what their lives entailed is ongoing. The half of the population that was missing from the story for most of a century is being written back in, name by name.