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Williamsburg
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A year after mosquito-plagued Jamestown burned down, the colonial capital was moved inland to a small village known as the Middle Plantation, soon rechristened
WILLIAMSBURG
in honor of King William III. To reflect the increasing wealth of the colony, a grand city was laid out, centering upon a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide avenue. Suitable buildings were constructed, beginning with the
capitol
in 1704 and culminating in the opulent
Governor's Palace
in 1720. By the mid-1700s, tobacco-rich Virginia was the most prosperous of the American colonies, and Williamsburg was its largest city - though with some two thousand residents, not on the scale of Philadelphia, New York or Boston. Williamsburg remained the seat of colonial government, and emerged as one of the leading centers of
revolutionary thought
: at the College of William and Mary, George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and George Mason argued the finer points of law and democracy, while in the capitol, and in the many raucous taverns that surrounded it, firebrand politicians like Patrick Henry held forth on the iniquities of colonialism and organized the first resistance to British rule. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the government moved to the more secure Richmond, and Williamsburg slowly faded from view, all but unrecognized for its place in American history.
Fortunately, many of the colonial structures survived intact until the 1920s, when oil baron John D. Rockefeller answered the pleas of a local priest, W. A. R. Goodwin, to support Williamsburg's restoration. Over the ensuing years, Rockefeller, with Goodwin acting as his agent, spent some $90 million buying and restoring the surviving structures to their original condition, in many cases building replicas from scratch. In 1934, Colonial Williamsburg opened as the first theme park in the US to use American history for amusement, with costumed guides as interpreters. While you have to buy a ticket to look inside most of the buildings, the entire historic area, which includes many fine gardens, is open all the time, and you can wander freely down the cobblestone streets and across the lush green commons. Cars are banned, and Williamsburg as a whole is a remarkably pleasant - if rather crowded - place.
Most of the
modern town
of Williamsburg lies to the west of the historical area and includes some fairly attractive architecture that is over a century old itself. It is dominated by the William and Mary College campus, whose students and staff comprise the majority of customers for the modest selection of shops and restaurants and inhabit the leafy residential streets further west. There is not much to the east of Colonial Williamsburg other than functional motels and drab commercial outlets. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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United States,
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