Raleigh Tavern
Virginia
The Raleigh Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street was Colonial Williamsburg's unofficial town hall from its construction before seventeen forty-two until it burned in eighteen fifty-nine. When the Royal Governor dissolved the House of Burgesses, the delegates simply walked across the street and kept talking at the Raleigh. In seventeen seventy-three, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and two others met here to propose the first committees of correspondence among the colonies, an early step toward united resistance.
On December fifth, seventeen seventy-six, five students from the College of William and Mary gathered in the tavern's Apollo Room and founded Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's first collegiate honor society. The building was reconstructed on its original foundations in nineteen thirty, and today it stands as one of Colonial Williamsburg's most visited exhibition buildings.
