Colonial Williamsburg

Listen first. Somewhere ahead, iron rings against iron in slow, steady strokes. A horse's hooves thud softly on the packed earth of the street. Wood smoke drifts out of a chimney, and a man in a linen shirt and a three-cornered hat nods as he walks past. No traffic hums behind you. For a moment, the only clock that seems to matter is the sun moving over the brick and clapboard roofs.

You are standing in Colonial Williamsburg, the restored heart of what was once the capital of Virginia. For most of the eighteenth century, this small town held a large share of the political life of Britain's largest American colony. Lawmakers, merchants, enslaved workers, tavern keepers and students all crossed these streets. Today the town is a living history museum, run by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and the people in period clothing are trained interpreters.

The story begins with a fire. Before 1699, the seat of colonial government sat at Jamestown, on a damp and unhealthy stretch of the James River. When the statehouse there burned in the late 1690s, Virginia's leaders moved the capital inland to higher ground. The settlement here was then called Middle Plantation. It was renamed Williamsburg in honour of King William the Third, the English monarch of the day.

The town was laid out with unusual care. Its spine is Duke of Gloucester Street, the long, wide avenue in front of you. At one end stands the Capitol. At the other stands the College of William and Mary, where the Wren Building still holds classes. Government at one end, learning at the other, and daily commerce in between. Walk the full length of the street and you walk through the whole idea of the colonial town.

The Capitol is where some of the sharpest arguments before the American Revolution took place. In the House of Burgesses, Virginia's elected assembly, Patrick Henry spoke out against the Stamp Act in 1765. Later debates here helped push the colonies toward independence. Here is a detail many visitors miss. The building you see is a reconstruction. The original Capitol was lost to fire, and the current one rose in the twentieth century on the old foundations.

That raises a fair question. How do you rebuild a town accurately when so much of it had vanished? Part of the answer came from far away. In 1929, researchers found an old copper engraving in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. It showed several of Williamsburg's main public buildings as they once looked. This single plate gave the restorers precious visual evidence of facades that no living person had ever seen.

The restoration itself began in the 1920s with a local clergyman, the Reverend William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin. He was rector of Bruton Parish Church, and he dreamed of saving the fading town. He convinced the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Junior to fund the work. Over the following decades, later buildings were removed, original structures were repaired, and lost ones were rebuilt from archaeology, documents and that copper plate.

Not everything here is a copy. Bruton Parish Church, with its brick tower and tall arched windows, is an original colonial building. It is still an active Episcopal church, so services continue inside it today. Nearby on Market Square stands the octagonal Magazine, another original. It stored the colony's gunpowder and weapons. In 1775, the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had powder secretly removed from it at night, and the town erupted in anger.

That governor lived at the Governor's Palace, at the end of the long green lawn running north from the main street. The palace was the home of royal power in Virginia. After independence, it briefly housed the new state's governors, including Thomas Jefferson. The original building burned in 1781, near the end of the war. What you see today is another careful reconstruction, complete with formal gardens and walls of shining arms arranged in the entrance hall.

Williamsburg did not stay the capital for long after the Revolution began. In 1780, the government moved west to Richmond, which was safer and more central. Without its lawmakers, the town grew quiet. That quiet is part of why so much survived. No booming industry arrived to tear down the old houses, and many colonial buildings simply stayed in place, waiting.

Here is the second fact that changes how the street looks. In the eighteenth century, roughly half of the people living in Williamsburg were enslaved Africans and African Americans. They cooked in the kitchens, tended the gardens, worked in the trades and served in the taverns. For many years, their story was barely told here. Today, interpreters portray enslaved men and women, and their experiences are part of the town's daily programmes.

The trades are where the town feels most alive. Follow the sounds and smells. In the blacksmith's shop, sparks fly from glowing iron. Coopers shape curved wooden staves into barrels. Wheelwrights, milliners, shoemakers and printers work with the tools and methods of the period. Many of these artisans train for years as apprentices, just as their colonial counterparts did. Ask them questions. They are often happy to explain each step of their work.

As you walk on, notice the small things. The white picket fences. The brick walls laid in alternating long and short faces. The gardens behind houses, with herbs and vegetables in neat beds. The distant beat of a drum, perhaps from the fife and drum corps on parade. Take one more look down Duke of Gloucester Street before you go. Somewhere along it, a hammer is still ringing, the way it did when this town helped argue a new country into being.