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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.
