The Building Older Than Its Town

You're standing at the west end of Duke of Gloucester Street, at the College of William and Mary, facing the old brick building everyone here calls the Wren. Look at the long brick front, then follow it up to the little white cupola on the roof. That building is older than the town you're about to walk through.

It went up between 1695 and 1700. Williamsburg had not yet been founded. Virginia's capital was still down at Jamestown, and this was open land between the James and York rivers. It is the oldest college building still standing in the United States.

The name comes from Sir Christopher Wren, the English architect behind St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Tradition holds that Wren designed it. Notice the word: tradition. The drawings are not what carries the claim, so treat the name as a family legend that stuck.

What is solid is how close this building came to being lost. In 1705, fire gutted it. Within a few years of opening, the place had to be rebuilt from a shell. Then it burned again in 1859. And in 1862, during the Civil War, Union soldiers set it on fire. Three times, a building meant to teach students became a pile of smoking brick.

So which Wren are you looking at? Between 1928 and 1931 it was restored, and the restorers had a clear target: the building's exterior as it appeared in 1705, which is well documented. They did not aim for the grand old version, or the Civil War version, or the one the 1859 fire left. They picked one year and returned the exterior to it.

That choice is a good key to the rest of Williamsburg. Much of what you're about to see is a careful restoration of a past that had faded away.

So look once more at that cupola and that brick. This is a building that was gutted, burned again, burned a third time, and then deliberately set back to how it looked in 1705. It's original and it's restored, and both are true.

When you're ready, walk west for about ten minutes, roughly 660 meters, to the next stop.