The Real Colonial Williamsburg

Have you been to Colonial Williamsburg?

I never have, exactly, though when I lived in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s I had a boyfriend who had attended the College of William & Mary, and who had waited tables in one of the historic taverns, so I visited the town one time. And I went to a conference at a hotel on the outskirts of the city about 15 years ago. The mental picture I had of it in the Colonial time was as a completely white place: the image I had been taught in high school of the American Revolution's era.

The truth is, around the time of the Revolution, Williamsburg was more than half Black because enslaved people made up that much of the population. That's one of the facts in this Washington Post story about research on a graveyard site in the city. 

The tourist attraction, Colonial Williamsburg, wasn't created until after World War II. 

At that point the church that had been a center of the Black community (the building since 1856, the site for decades earlier) was thought to not "fit with a 1750s motif. It was torn down..., after Colonial Williamsburg bought out the congregation and paid for the new church outside the historic district."

The congregation's graveyard was lost to memory in the shuffle, somehow, which seems hard to believe. But in other ways, perhaps not, since this was the same era that highways were being built through entire Black neighborhoods.

Sixty-three graves have been found.