We started off today with breakfast at the King’s Arms Tavern. We had a lovely buffet, in high style, including a sorbet fruit drink. I should have taken a photo of breakfast for Alex. I think we eat there again, I will try to remember.
After that Kelly took us on a walk around much of the historical district, talking about the creation of historic Williamsburg and some of the ways buildings were acquired and restored. We saw an archeological dig on Nicholson street and we looked at several of the buildings and talked about the construction.
She also pointed out some things that they had fundamentally changed from the original in order to make the experience of the living history museum more pleasant. There is little natural stone in this part of Virginia, so they did not have ready supplies for cobblestones or other pavers, so the Duke of Gloucester Street was described as a mile long, 90 feet wide, and 2 feet deep. Today it is paved with brick sidewalks. The historic district is full of beautiful tall mature trees, but one of the first things the colonists did when they moved the capitol from Jamestown to Middle Plantation and renamed it Williamsburg was cut down the trees. Trees would have been a fire hazard, because of lightening, and they were trying to build an 18th century urban metropolis, and trees would just not have fit that image. But the trees were there in the 1930, and they are so beautiful, and we are all glad they left them. Another change they had to make was the height of the fences in front of houses. In the colonial period they would not have been the cute 3-4 foot high picket fences, they would have been tall, taller than a man, to give some privacy from the street. But for the museum we want people to be able to see the houses, so the white picket fences that we all so much associate with the colonial period, and with Williamsburg, are not historically accurate.
We spent the rest of the morning at Wetherburn's Tavern learning about how the staff at Williamsburg use primary sources to reconstruct buildings and learn the histories of the people who lived in them. We were then sent off in our groups to work with some primary sources at other locations. Our group, which is working on the Battle of Yorktown, had a letter from a Revolutionary War soldier, visited the Magazine to talk to the interpreter there.
After lunch at the Golden Horseshoe (Dad, it is on a golf course, said to be one of the most beautiful public courses around, you have probably played there of course) we walked to Bruton Heights School.
Bruton Height School is now owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and used as a classroom and office building. But in the first half of the 20th century it was the segregated school for African-American children.
We did several primary source exercises. The best one was based on the life of Matthew Ashby. It involved three groups working on different documents to try to put together the story of his life, and it took all three to make sense of any of it.
What really gave the story punch was the visit of an interpreter who was Anne Ashby, his wife, after we had finished the exercise. She was fantastic in character, and then she came out of character to talk to us about how she works on the character.
Later in the afternoon we had a lecture about using the technology put out by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and then we had a short session to work in our groups before dinner.
After dinner we saw a fantastic program of African stories -- very much like the African-American experience we see on the DC trip -- called Papa Said, Mama Said.
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