Colonial Williamsburg: The Capital They Put Back Together

For eighty-one years, Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia, the largest, most populous, and most influential of the British colonies in America. Then, in seventeen eighty, Governor Thomas Jefferson moved the capital to Richmond to protect it from British raids, and the old city began to fade. Buildings decayed. Streets went quiet. The college and a hospital kept the town alive, but the grand argument at the heart of colonial Virginia moved elsewhere.

What you see today is the result of one clergyman's alarm and one billionaire's checkbook. Starting in nineteen twenty-six, the Reverend William Goodwin, rector of the historic Bruton Parish Church, pressed John D. Rockefeller Junior to fund a full-scale restoration of the colonial city, and Rockefeller committed in nineteen twenty-seven. Goodwin feared that structures tied to the birth of the nation would be lost forever. Rockefeller agreed, and what followed was one of the largest historic preservation projects in American history. Over the following years, hundreds of buildings were restored or rebuilt, with Rockefeller's support eventually running to many millions of dollars.

But the history beneath the restoration is the part that endures. This was the ground where George Washington debated taxes, where Patrick Henry delivered speeches that shook colonial legislatures, where Thomas Jefferson shaped the ideas he would carry into the Declaration of Independence. Three future presidents studied at the College of William and Mary here, Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler.

Williamsburg is sometimes dismissed as a theme park of the past. That sells it short. The debates held in the Capitol on Duke of Gloucester Street were not reenactments. They were the real arguments, about liberty, about slavery, about what kind of country this might become, that made everything after them possible.