The Brafferton Indian School

Before European colonization, a vast number of Native people populated the land we think of as Virginia. Speaking a variety of Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquoian languages, they organized themselves into nations, chiefdoms, and tribes according to kinship networks and political alliances. English migrants brought disease, warfare, and practices of enslavement that caused Indigenous populations to decline.¹ The colonists also carried into the continent the belief that they could spread English culture and Christianity among those Natives who “live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.”²

Many influential Englishmen supported this mission. When the renowned scientist Robert Boyle died in 1691, he left a considerable fortune behind for “pious and charitable uses.” ³ To that end, the trustees of his estate purchased a large farm in Yorkshire known as Brafferton Manor. They used its profits to fund missionary efforts in British North America. With this money, Virginia’s leaders opened a school for Native children alongside William & Mary, which became known as the Brafferton School. They hoped that the school would enable Indigenous students to “read, write & all other arts & sciences, that the best Englishmen’s sons do learn,” and allow them to “know their great Almighty God.” ⁴ Most of all, they hoped these students would return to their people as missionaries to spread the gospel.

After decades of violence, though, local Native people were reluctant to deliver their children to the care of the English. Unable to convince tributary tribes to send students voluntarily, Virginians purchased four American Indian children from the Catawba, who may have been war captives from a different tribe, and brought them to the school.⁵ But circumstances changed with the outbreak of war in 1711. After the Tuscarora and their allies went to war with English settlers in North Carolina, Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood visited some of the neutral factions among the Tuscarora, as well as other neighboring Indians, to make a proposition. With his militia behind him, he suggested that each tribe send two children to the school as “hostages” in exchange for Virginia’s friendship. As a token of that friendship, Virginia would allow them to skip their yearly tribute payments of twenty beaver pelts.⁶

Though trust ran thin, a mix of incentives and coercion pushed some Indian leaders to send their children to the Brafferton School. By 1711, the Chickahominy, Meherrin, Nansemond, Nottoway, and Pamunkey nations sent a total of ten students to the Brafferton school. The next year, there were twenty-four students. This was likely the Brafferton School’s busiest period. With funding stretched, according to an account by a William & Mary professor named Hugh Jones, an “abundance of them used to die, either thro’ Sickness, change of Provision, and way of Life; or as some will have it, often for want of proper Necessaries and due Care taken with them.” ⁷ In later years, financial difficulties and changing diplomatic conditions caused the number of students to plummet. Indeed, a lull in Native enrollment in the early 1720s allowed funds from the Boyle estate to accumulate. This provided the college with the means to build a new structure for housing and educating Indian students. The impressive three-story building known as Brafferton Hall was finished in 1723. ⁸ In the following years, the number of Indian scholars hovered in the single digits. ⁹

The Brafferton School’s Indian scholars learned to read and write in English from the Bible and the Anglican catechism. They would have spent time with William & Mary’s white students at daily mealtimes and at weekly chapel visits. Because the College’s enrollments were small, they made up a significant part of the student body. Dressed in English clothes, but likely retaining traditional hairstyles and adornments, they would have been a prominent presence in the town of Williamsburg. Usually arriving around the age of seven or eight, the Indian scholars stayed at the school for two to four years. Some left early, as was the case with two unnamed Cherokee students who, according to Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie, could “not be reconcil’d to their Books” and “went away of their own accord [without] leave.”¹⁰

Unfortunately, little written documentation exists about the Brafferton students’ lives while at school. Much of what we know about the school comes from Virginia’s white leaders, rather than from the students. Yet recent archaeological work has offered some tantalizing clues about student lives. In 2011 and 2012, William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg excavated the Brafferton Building’s exterior and cellar. This work uncovered glass beads and copper, which may have been used for ornamentation. Even more intriguing was a collection of chipped stone and glass tools that resemble Indigenous artifacts found elsewhere. These findings suggest that Brafferton students adapted traditional toolmaking practices to European materials. ¹⁵ The Brafferton School aimed to introduce its students to English culture. But behind closed doors, this evidence suggests that their Native cultures persisted, and may have even thrived. ¹⁶