History is a story not always told in words. It is there to discover in fragments of a window sash or a long-discarded drinking vessel, and bits and pieces speak to those who are skilled and curious.
Buildings, for example, can tell stories of past lives, providing a framework for existing theories or disproving long-held interpretations. Matthew Webster and his team of preservationists are eager to listen.
The building that housed Williamsburg’s Bray School tells an amazing story, said Webster, the executive director of the Grainger Department of Architectural Preservation and Research for Colonial Williamsburg. Historians once hypothesized that the building where from 1760 to 1774 more than 300 enslaved and free Black children were taught was dilapidated and practically uninhabitable even at the time — and it likely did not survive into the 19th century.
But then the narrative shifted.
“It goes from a building that was in really bad condition to a brand-new building that these children were actually the first occupants of,” Webster said.
“It’s a great lesson in research.”
Research has been and continues to be the cornerstone of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s work. It fuels the discoveries that add context and clarity to the stories of America’s past, and it informs the efforts to preserve, protect and accurately reconstruct the structures that illustrate 18th-century life in Williamsburg. And it is one of the pillars of a fundraising campaign to ensure that this work can continue.
A Recent Example
Lingering questions sustained the search for Williamsburg’s Bray School. The evidence, Webster said, was not fitting together.
One important piece of that evidence was a letter to the Bray Associates who funded the school by Robert Carter Nicholas, who described the building as not being “tenantable.” That word led scholars to believe that the building was falling down and likely did not survive.
“That cascaded to all of this other research that influenced the interpretation,” Webster said.
In the continuing efforts to find answers, Colonial Williamsburg preservation staff once more looked to a small building on Prince George Street. After collecting wood core samples from framing in the building, dendrochronology, or the study of growth patterns in trees, told a different story: This building was the Bray School. These samples provided a construction date for the building between 1759 and early 1760, with the school opening on September 29, 1760.
“Bray is the great example of stepping back and connecting all the dots,” Webster said. “We were lucky enough to be the ones who found that Rosetta stone.”
The building also spoke to Jack Gary and his archaeology team. The structure’s longevity and the purposes it has served through its centuries of existence made that team’s job more challenging, albeit more intriguing. In addition to a school and a tenement, the building had been converted to a dormitory for women by the 20th century, and later it was the home for William & Mary’s ROTC program.
“We had these very interesting layers of stuff, probably things kids had been throwing out the window for the past 100 years,” said Ashley -McCuistion, a staff archaeologist. “But it was kind of cool because we had Coke bottles from the ’50s, and we had this layer of stuff from the ’40s and this layer of stuff from the ’30s.”
“That’s the power of archaeology,” said Gary, Colonial Williamsburg’s director of archaeology. “We have to deal with all [the periods] even though there is a time period that we’re aiming for to interpret for the public. But we have to understand all of it.”
A Careful Deconstruction
To get to the building’s beginnings, the additions had to be stripped away. Three-dimensional laser scans were taken before the deconstruction began, and as the layers were stripped away, Dani Jaworski collected samples for future study.
“We’ve obviously taken extra-special care with what we know is early, but we also took that same care with what we found from the early 19th century,” said Jaworski, the manager of architectural collections. “Ours is the colonial era, but there are other people out there researching later buildings. I think the history of this building, how it evolved from a school to a tenement to a rental property and then to a dormitory — that’s a huge part of the story, and we didn’t want to overlook that.”
It was exciting to rediscover the Bray School, Jaworski said. But the discovery also represented a new opportunity for her work.
“This is the first time I’ve ever been able to look at a building from the start and then dig through it and see its progression,” she said. The structure yielded nails from the 18th century, textiles from the 19th century and bobby pins that 20th-century college students had discarded.
Persistent Questions
Nicole Brown, who interprets Bray School teacher Ann Wager in the Historic Area, went to Europe in search of information about the school.
“[There is a] curiosity to know more, which is an illustration of Colonial Williamsburg’s institutional priorities,” said Carl Childs, the executive director of research and education and the Abby and George O’Neill Director of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. “The research is never really done. New technology, new resources — we are constantly evaluating new things.”
This new information can, in turn, challenge historians to question what they think they know, said Peter Inker, the director of Historical Research and Digital History.
“The histories that were written in the past may censor or completely ignore elements of a document or record that referred to things they deemed inappropriate,” he said, noting that societal norms of the time can play a role in framing the questions.
Asking questions led Jenn Wilkoski, Colonial Williamsburg’s Shirley and Richard Roberts Architectural Historian, to Colonial Williamsburg’s Special Collections last year. She found a sketch of the building that had once housed the Bray School that was done by an architect who visited Williamsburg in the early 20th century. It included a floor plan, elevations and other details that will help as the building is restored, including what the chimney looked like and architectural details of the door frames.
“It was one thing that we found just recently that helped us better understand the evolution of the building,” she said. “That little sketch book is giving us a lot of information.”
The Bray School is only one of the projects currently underway. Preservationists and archaeologists are working together to better understand the Magazine, for example, and to look deeper into what is being uncovered at the site of First Baptist Church. Archaeologists continue to dig at the site of John Custis IV’s garden, and preservationists are working on everything from projects involving the interiors of buildings to general maintenance.
As Matthew Webster often says — there’s much work still to be done.