USA Guide
The Capital Region
Colonial Williamsburg
Providing details on what the eighteenth-century capital of Virginia may have been like, Colonial Williamsburg is an essential tourist experience for anyone with a flair for American history. While you have to buy a pricey ticket to look inside the restored buildings, the entire historic area is open all the time, and you can wander freely down the cobblestone streets and across the green commons.
From the Wren Building on the William and Mary campus, separated from Colonial Williamsburg by a mock-historic shopping center, Duke of Gloucester Street runs east through the historic area to the old Capitol. The first of its eighteenth-century buildings, a hundred yards along, is the Episcopalian Bruton Parish Church, where all the big names of the revolutionary period were known to visit. Behind the church, the broad Palace Green spreads north to the Governor's Palace. West of the church, the 1771 courthouse and the octagonal powder magazine, protected by a guardhouse, face each other in the midst of Market Square. Further along, Chowning's Tavern, a reconstruction of an alehouse that stood here in 1766, is one of four functioning pubs in the district, with lively entertainment nightly.
The real architectural highlight is the Capitol, a monumental edifice at the east end of Duke of Gloucester Street. The current building, a 1945 reconstruction of the 1705 original, has an open-air ground-floor arcade linking two keyhole-shaped wings. One wing housed the elected, legislative body of the Colonial government, the House of Burgesses, while the other held the chambers of the General Court – where alleged felons, including thirteen of Blackbeard's pirates, were tried.
The gift shops along Duke of Gloucester Street have been done up as eighteenth-century apothecaries, cobblers, and silversmiths. The Raleigh Tavern here was where the independence-minded colonial government reconvened after being dissolved by the loyalist governors in 1769 and again in 1774; the original burned down in 1859. Finally, the imposing two-story Governor's Palace, at the north end of the Palace Green, has a grand ballroom and opulent furnishings, and must have served as a telling declaration of royal power, no doubt enforced by the startling display of swords, muskets, and other deadly weaponry interlaced on the walls of the foyer.
For those still in need of further immersion into the re-created past, as well as a heavy dose of theme-park (sur)reality, the park presents "Revolutionary City," a two-hour daily spectacle on the east end of the area, in which costumed actors on the streets act out the highlights of the 1770s and 1780s, sweeping up tourists in the rebellious fervor of the day with a flurry of angry speeches and shouting matches.