Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area

Williamsburg became the capital of Virginia in 1699, after fire drove the government up from swampy Jamestown to higher, healthier ground. Over the next eighty years it grew into the political and social center of the colony, laid out along the broad axis of Duke of Gloucester Street with the College of William and Mary at one end and the Capitol at the other, and the grand Governor's Palace facing its own green.

This was a stage for the arguments that led to independence. In the Capitol, Patrick Henry rose in 1765 to denounce the Stamp Act, and through the 1760s and 1770s the House of Burgesses met, protested, and was dissolved by royal governors again and again, its members simply reconvening at the Raleigh Tavern down the street. Washington, Jefferson, and Wythe all walked these blocks. When the capital moved to Richmond in 1780 for safety during the war, Williamsburg's moment as the center of Virginia ended, and the town settled into a long, quiet country slumber.

The restoration began with a country minister's dream. The Reverend W. A. R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church, had long wanted to save Williamsburg's old buildings, and in 1926 he found a backer in John D. Rockefeller Jr. To keep local property prices from soaring, the two worked in secret, Goodwin quietly buying up run-down houses as Rockefeller's agent while the two exchanged coded telegrams so no one would guess who was behind it. Not until a town meeting in 1928 did Goodwin reveal his mysterious patron.

What followed was one of the most ambitious preservation projects ever attempted. Using 1790 as the cutoff, the effort restored more than eighty surviving 18th-century buildings, took down hundreds of later structures that had crowded in, and rebuilt over three hundred vanished buildings on their own excavated foundations, guided by old insurance plats, letters, and careful archaeology. The Governor's Palace and the Capitol, both long gone, rose again on the exact ground where the digging had found them.

The town opened to the public in 1935 and grew for decades into the educational institution it is now. Its story has kept evolving, too, as Colonial Williamsburg has worked to tell the fuller truth of the place, including the lives of the enslaved and free Black people who were half the town's population and whose labor built and ran it.

The heart of it all is the Historic Area, a roughly 300-acre stretch of restored streets, homes, shops, taverns, and public buildings kept as they were in the colonial capital's prime. Costumed interpreters populate it, some playing named townspeople of the era, others working the trades that once kept the town alive. You can watch a blacksmith draw iron at the forge, a printer set type by hand, a cabinetmaker join wood without a nail, and a cook tend a hearth much as it was done two and a half centuries ago.

The grand set pieces are the reconstructed Capitol, where the burgesses met, and the Governor's Palace with its formal gardens and famous hall of arms, but half the pleasure is smaller: the Public Gaol, the apothecary, the milliner, the fife-and-drum corps marching down the street, the sheep and oxen at work. More than eighty of the buildings are the genuine 18th-century originals, so you are often standing inside walls that saw the Revolution firsthand.

It is also, quietly, a garden. The grounds hold a certified arboretum and dozens of period gardens, boxwood parterres behind the Palace and kitchen plots behind the houses, so even a walk with no ticket rewards you with green, and the whole town glows at holiday time with candles and greenery in the windows.

Colonial Williamsburg sits right in the town of Williamsburg, easy to reach off Interstate 64 in the tidewater region of eastern Virginia. The pedestrian spine, Duke of Gloucester Street, is free to walk, and much of the outdoor life of the town, the interpreters, the trades demonstrations you can watch from the street, and the gardens, can be enjoyed without a ticket. Going inside the exhibition buildings and taking part in the ticketed programs calls for an admission pass, so it helps to decide first what you most want to see.

Give yourself real time. This is a full day at least, and it rewards more, so many travelers make it a two or three day base and fold in the rest of the Historic Triangle. Spring and fall are the most comfortable seasons in this humid coastal country, summer is hot, and the holiday season is a beloved time here. Wear comfortable shoes, plan to walk, and let yourself slow to the pace of a town that has already outlived its own capital and come all the way back.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.