Then and Now

Colonial Williamsburg reconstructed Chowning's Tavern, at bottom, in the spirit of conjecture and the convivial eighteenth-century alehouses that stood elsewhere in Virginia's Tidewater and in England. Architects, eyeing a 1780s map that shows two buildings on adjoining lots at the eastern boundary of northern Market Square, designed it to appear to be a storehouse and an ordinary joined by a center entry. Opened in 1941 as a modern operating tavern, as it is today, Chowning's occupies colonial business sites successively home to, among others, a tailor, a blacksmith, a wheelwright, merchants, and, apparently, the spirits establishment Josiah Chowning ran from 1766 to 1768.

When Williamsburg's restoration began in 1927, the hotel pictured at top dominated the properties. Known as the City Hotel, Colonial Hotel, Colonial Inn, Spencer's, Williamsburg Inn, and Williamsburg Inn Annex, it dated to about 1859. Union soldiers used it for a commissary during the Civil War, and flew from its front a United States flag Old-timer John Charles said, 'The girls of Williamsburg, to avoid walking under it, used to walk out in the road.' During its career, owners added porches, a roof turret, and an extension, and townspeople made it central to community life. Wreckers demolished it in 1939.

For further information about Historic Area buildings, visit http://research.history.org/ewilliamsburg

In 1715, when 'magazine' still commonly meant 'storehouse,' Virginia, in need of a place to keep military equipment, began to build one on Williamsburg's Market Square. Apparently designed by Governor Alexander Spotswood, constructed by Henry Tyler, and finished in 1716, the octagonal, two-story-with-attic brick armory sequestered small arms, tents, canteens, shot, rope, flints, gunpowder, and such. In 1755, during the French and Indian War, the colony enhanced it with a ten-foot-tall brick wall.

Governor Dunmore turned the Public Magazine into the flashpoint of the Revolution in Virginia when, at his orders, royal marines rifled it for the unquiet colony's gunpowder before dawn, April 21, 1775. After that war, it served for a market house, a Baptist meetinghouse, a Confederate arsenal, a dancing school, a stable, and an Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities museum. The black-and-white photo above shows the magazine after 1890, when the APVA bought the falling-down relic for renovation from Moses R. Harrell for $400, and before 1934, when Colonial Williamsburg and the association undertook its restoration and joint exhibition. The color photo shows the Magazine'leased by Colonial Williamsburg in 1934 and purchased in 1986'as it is exhibited today.

In the eighteenth century, iron bars guarded the windows of the story-and-a-half Greenhow Brick Office on Williamsburg's Market Square. On the first floor, the single, undivided room had diagonal bars hinged from the outside and secured by bolts from within. When Colonial Williamsburg began the building's restoration in 1948, experts trying to fathom its original, eighteenth-century purpose were confined to theorization. Tradition made the place the capital's Debtor's Prison, or a jail. Without ruling it out as a dwelling, researchers favored the idea of a lockup, but could document no slammer of any sort on the site.

A 1782 map shows an unlabeled edifice of its shape at the location, just below the boundary dividing Williamsburg between James City County on the south, and York County on the north. But most of James City County's records were destroyed in 1865, and no paper that survives from the 1700s describes the building's purpose. In 1801, merchant Robert Greenhow took out an insurance policy that said he maintained it as a storage building, as, it seems, had his father, John Greenhow, before him. They called it 'a lumber house,' a storage place that, like any 1700s outbuilding, would come within the definition of an 'office.'

Current thinking is that building, shown today in the color inset, was raised after 1760 in answer to an investigation that faulted Williamsburg, the port for the nearest reach of the James River, for having no proper customs house. A customs house might explain the bars.

The core of eighteenth-century Virginia's central prison, the 1704 lockup in this black and white archival photo, was, when Williamsburg's restoration began in 1927, all that remained of what during the 1700s had evolved into a walled, three structure compound that numbered among its inmates not only assorted miscreants but the keeper and his family. At that, the surviving pitched-roof structure was much reworked from what records say was by 1741 a flat roofed gaol to use the colonial word for jail'that confined felons in two western cells, and, across an exercise yard, debtors in two eastern chambers.

The first gaoler, John Redwood, had charge of prisoners dispatched from county gaols to Williamsburg for General Court trial of cases punishable by hanging or maiming, and was as well caretaker of the Capitol uphill to the south. The General Assembly authorized a debtors' prison addition in 1711, and a keeper's house in 1722. Apart from ordinary murderers, thieves, counterfeiters, and the like, the gaol confined refractory Indians, slave-revolt conspirators, pirates including some of Blackbeard's'and redcoat Revolutionary War trophy Henry 'Hair Buyer' Hamilton.

During the Civil War, says a historical report, federal soldiers occupying the area demolished all but the original structure for bricks to build quarters. What was left served local needs into the nineteenth century. The first color inset shows a portion of the surviving southern wall, and the second, a view of the gaol today, rebuilt on the ancient foundations.

The Library of Congress catalogue card accompanying the 1920s archival black-and-white photo of what was left of eighteenth-century Williamsburg merchant George Jackson’s abode says only: “destroyed c. 1933.” There is more to the story.

Jackson moved from Norfolk to Virginia’s capital in 1773 or 1774, buying the circa-1767 four-room house and adjoining store with its York Street lot from businessman Lewis Hansford. Jackson lived there—renovating and repairing the place from 1783 to 1793—until his death in 1794. Jackson’s daughter Sarah inherited the property and lived in it on and off until her death in 1854.

A Williamsburg newspaper reported in her obituary that her father was:

a patriot, who at a gloomy period of the American Revolution, chartered a vessel to Bermuda, and there secretly at eminent peril of life, procured a supply of gunpowder, with which he returned in safety to the Old Dominion, and placed in the possession of his then desponding country.

Architects made measured drawings of the house in 1928, as Williamsburg’s restoration began, and Colonial Williamsburg acquired the property in 1939, but the lot stood empty until 1954. Reconstructed on its original site, the George Jackson House and Store today takes the shade of tall old trees on the north side of Francis Street at the Historic Area’s east end—as the inset shows—and is among the lodgings available to Colonial Williamsburg hotel guests.

The Ludwell-Paradise House on Duke of Gloucester Street is the third Williamsburg structure John D. Rockefeller Jr. invested in, and the first he purchased outright, as he considered the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin's proposal to finance the city's restoration. Rockefeller pledged $10,000 November 29, 1926, to Goodwin, a College of William and Mary fund-raiser and Bruton Parish's rector, for restoration studies of the school's Wren Building. December 2 he promised what worked out to be $10,000 toward rehabilitation of the parish's George Wythe House. Five days later, on the chance he'd adopt Goodwin's plan and need the Ludwell-Paradise, Rockefeller authorized the minister to buy the vacant, circa-1716 home for $8,000 to transfer in trust to the college for faculty housing. Rockefeller decided November 22, 1927, to launch what became Colonial Williamsburg and asked the school in 1928 to return the deed. The house opened as an exhibition in April 1935, four months after its restoration was finished. The black-and-white Historic American Buildings Survey photograph above shows the house—named for early owners—during renovations. The home once exhibited Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's folk art collection and is now, as depicted in the color image, a private residence.

Look at those four columns supporting the pediment of Williamsburg's Courthouse of 1770. Seen them before? Probably not. Not unless you happened down the Duke of Gloucester Street between the summer of 1911 and the autumn of 1932. Before and after, they weren't there. Not in the earliest surviving image of the building, drawn in 1796. Nor in the earliest 1900s photographs.

Town tradition was that such supports had been ordered from England in the 1770s'the Courthouse's original stone steps came from Great Britain in 1772'but that the Revolution forestalled their delivery. They still hadn't arrived by the night in April 1911 that fire destroyed the structure's roof and interior. Rebuilding the Courthouse was an opportunity, folks figured, to supply the place of the missing shipment with homemade columns of brick covered in cement. But, as Colonial Williamsburg ascertained when it began the Courthouse's restoration in 1932, there was no evidence that such an order had been written or that there were such columns in the 18th century, and it took these down.

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