Historic Site: Governor's Palace

If building a Palace was easy, everyone would have one. But the governor’s house took longer to finish than anyone expected. The Virginia General Assembly agreed in 1705 to finance the construction of a “house for the governor.”¹ But after five years of planning and construction, the building remained incomplete. Worried that an unfinished structure would be “to all strangers a visible testimony of an imprudent undertaking,” Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood pressed the assembly for more funds and eventually took charge of the construction himself.²

Spotswood had grand designs. Over time, the ballooning cost of the Palace’s construction raised questions among the gentry. The House of Burgesses eventually tried to have Spotswood removed from office, complaining among other things that he “lavishes away” the colony’s funds in constructing the governor’s home.³ They were particularly critical of his ambitious plans for the gardens, which included a canal, fishpond, and terraces.⁴ The Governor’s Palace gardens were among the most imitated and admired in the American colonies.

Construction of the building and grounds was partly funded by a tax on the importation of enslaved people into Virginia.⁵ At one point, the contractor in charge of construction of the building sold three enslaved people, who had been purchased as laborers, to purchase materials.⁶ The building was finally completed, at great cost, in 1722.

The Palace’s richly furnished interiors were designed to impress. We know a great deal about the furniture, decorations, and goods contained in the palace. After Governors Fauquier and Botetourt died in 1768 and 1770, inventories of their possessions identified thousands of items spread across the Palace’s 61 rooms. We also know many details about Governor Dunmore’s furnishings because his goods were sold at auctions after he fled the Palace in 1775. Some of these items now reside in the reconstructed Palace.⁷

Visitors to Williamsburg generally admired the Palace’s Palladian architecture and graceful gardens. One observer remembered the Palace as a building which “far exceeded the Temple of Diana at Ephesus or that of the Sun at Palmyra” (which were two legendary ancient temples).⁸ Another traveler contrasted the Palace’s beauty with the simplicity of the rest of Williamsburg: “There is nothing considerable in” the town “but the College, the Governor's House, and one or two more, which are no bad Piles.”⁹

For much of the eighteenth century, the Governor’s Palace could have been referred to as the Lieutenant Governor’s Palace. Its first five inhabitants were actually Lieutenant Governors, serving in the place of absentee governors.¹⁰ Of the building’s inhabitants, only Lords Botetourt and Dunmore were royal governors in their own right.

The Palace was built for ceremonial activities, but it was also a home. Like any home, it witnessed cycles of birth, life, and death. Three governors died in the building. When Lieutenant Governor Hugh Drysdale died in 1726, the colony’s Council assured his widow Hester Drysdale that “they desire she will please to continue in the Governor's house, and make use of any other Conveniences about it during her stay.”¹¹

The governors’ families included a few children. The Gooch family raised their son William there. Governor Dinwiddie arrived in the colony with his wife Rebecca and two daughters, Elizabeth and Rebecca. Charlotte Murray, wife of Governor Dunmore, arrived in the Palace with six children. In December 1774, she delivered another child at the Palace, a daughter named Virginia in the colony’s honor.¹²

The Palace was Williamsburg’s biggest household. At any given time, between twenty and thirty white servants and enslaved people lived and worked in the Palace.¹³ They worked not only in the main building, but also in the kitchens, the stables, coach house, the gardens, park, farm, and elsewhere. We also know that several enslaved children lived in the Palace complex.¹⁴

The Governor’s Palace was built to entertain. It hosted notable visitors, including English philosopher George Berkeley, the evangelist George Whitefield, and neighboring governors.¹⁵ Governors also conducted diplomacy with Native delegations at the Palace.

Prior to the revolution, Williamsburg marked the birthdays of kings and queens with an elaborate celebration at the Governor’s Palace. These events featured a ball, food, drinking, and fireworks.

By the mid-1770s, revolutionary colonists threatened the Palace. In April 1775, after Governor Dunmore seized gunpowder stored at the Magazine, his wife and family fled the Palace. They were more popular than the governor. A writer in the Virginia Gazette welcomed them back when they returned the next month and remarked that the “whole country” had the “most unfeigned regard for her Ladyship, and wish her long to live amongst them.”

Fearing that colonists would attack the Palace in retribution for seizing the gunpowder, Dunmore initially armed the Palace. But he and his family had fled the Palace by June. It was the end of royal government in Virginia.

Dunmore’s household possessions were unceremoniously auctioned off. The people of Williamsburg took possession of the Palace, and it became the residence of Virginia’s wartime governors Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. After the capital city moved to Richmond, it was briefly used as a Revolutionary War hospital. The main building burned down in 1781, and the rest of the complex was either sold off or left to decay. ¹⁸