Inside the recreated James Fort –costumed interpreters demonstrate musket firing.
Defense posts on the Yorktown Battlefield.
My introduction to Colonial Williamsburg comes with a tour led by Martha Dandridge Custis Washington— actually, a historic interpreter portraying Mrs. Washington when George Washington would often visit the former Virginia capital after his election to the House of Burgesses. We walk along shaded streets lined with both reconstructed and original structures, some of them around 300 years old. “We have a tendency, especially with our Founding Fathers, to cast them in marble, and we forget they’re real people,” says interpreter Katharine Pittman, elegantly dressed in a sunburst colonial-style dress and a flat-crowned hat with a stitched blue pattern. “With Mrs. Washington, one of my goals is to make her human and to remind our guests that she had an entire life, emotions, thoughts, feelings, happy times, and sad times, and that she wasn’t this very stoic person you see in a portrait.” Within Colonial Williamsburg’s 301 acres, 88 restored original 18th- and early 19th-century structures still stand, with others reconstructed on original foundations thanks to support fromphilanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. starting in the late 1920s. The capitol dominates the view down Duke of Gloucester Street and is home to what were the chambers of the upper and lower houses
of the legislature, the Council and House of Burgesses, respectively. Another expansive view stretches down Grassy Palace Green to the Governor’s Palace noted for its chandeliered ballroom. The original 1715 Bruxton Parish Church with its 1769 tower still has an active parish today. Taverns were community centers of sorts as venues for lectures, plays, dining, private gambling and parties. The reconstructed Raleigh Tavern has six rooms for socializing, while the “great room" of Wetherburn’s Tavern served as an informal town hall. The central Courthouse has mock sessions every 30 minutes, where justices preside over re-enactments of actual 18th- century cases. The 1715 Public Magazine, where cannon firing demonstrations take place, has an impressive collection of muskets and pistols. The original Wythe House retains the same wooden floors where Thomas Jefferson once walked while studying law under the tutelage of legal scholar George Wythe. George Washington also slept there when planning the Continental Army’s Siege of Yorktown. Equally impressive, the maroon-colored, original Peyton Randolph House hosted the likes of Randolph, Patrick Henry, Washington, and Jefferson around the dinner table.
COLONIAL LIVING HISTORY
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2018
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