Williamsburg Becomes The Capital

       The site of Williamsburg was first occupied in 1633 by Middle Plantation, a stockaded settlement erected against Indian attack by hard-pressed colonists from near by Jamestown. Although the College of William and Mary was founded here in 1693, Middle Plantation was only a small village throughout the seventeenth century. In 1699 it consisted of the main college building, several houses, an ordinary, two mills, a smith's shop, and a few stores, clustered around a brick church and graveyard. 

Colonists looking forward to time spent in
Williamsburg...

       In 1698 the Statehouse at Jamestown was leveled by fire, and the following year the legislators decided to move their capital to Middle Plantation, which they renamed Williamsburg in honor of the reigning English king, William III. Jamestown at that time was a crowded, cluttered town surrounded by brackish swamps which bred disease. It is easy to see why Williamsburg, serenely located on a broad ridge between the York and James rivers, was preferred. 

       From 1699 until the dark war year of 1780, when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg was the political, social, and cultural center of the entire colony. Here the royal governor lived, the Assembly convened, and the courts sat. Twice each year, when the general court was in session, crowds came to Williamsburg for "Publick Times." The population of the town (normally only about 2000) doubled almost overnight. Taverns were jammed. Shops were stocked with the latest goods imported from London. There were horse races, fairs, and formal balls. Auctions were held at various taverns and at Market Square. For several weeks the city hummed with activity. 

       In Williamsburg's new H-shaped brick Capitol - the first statehouse to be called a "capitol" since Roman times-laws were passed affecting a vast territory which stretched westward to the Mississippi. Virginia was the largest and most populous of all the British colonies. Although distant settlements could never be fully controlled, every person in the enormous British domain of Virginia was subject to the government at Williamsburg - large planters and small freeholders in the Tidewater and Piedmont; merchants and dock hands at the busy wharves in Norfolk; settlers searching for pitch, tar, and turpentine in the Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina border; German immigrant ironworkers in Spotsylvania; tenants on Lord Fairfax' baronial estate of five million acres of the Northern Neck; frontiersmen and the agents of land speculators deep in Indian territory on the banks of the Ohio. 

       Williamsburg was chiefly a planters' capital, however. The ruling class of Virginia was largely dependent upon the growth and sale of tobacco, that broad-leafed "Imperial weed" which John Rolfe had learned to cure in 1612. Some of the planters lived in the Piedmont, rolling country beyond the fall line of the rivers, but most of the leaders of this aristocracy came from the Tidewater. Presiding over a plantation which was a miniature village, the large planter lived most of the time in his mansion house, usually close by one of the many convenient waterways. But he spent many weeks of the year in Williamsburg, where he sometimes built or rented a town house for convenience when called to the city by politics or business. Otherwise he stayed in one of the numerous taverns, many of which were located along Duke of Gloucester Street near the Capitol. 

A German immigrant blacksmith works on anvil.

       The brief "house histories" which constitute the main text of this guidebook may offer some insight into the life of this bygone century. It was a crude life by modern standards. The death rate of children was appalling. The "average" man - perhaps the small freeholder-had little formal education. Wives had few legal rights. Boys were apprenticed to a trade when only fourteen. The brutal slave trade flourished. Besides the slaves, there were many white "indentured servants" (those who sold their services for a period of years in exchange for passage from England), living in a state of virtual bondage. Some of these were criminals whose sentences had been commuted to deportation. 

       Yet life in colonial Virginia had many rewards. The advancing frontier offered opportunities. Even those who were indentured could look forward to freedom and a future brighter than could usually be attained in England. It was also a hospitable period. There were country jigs as well as minuets; there was plenty to eat and drink; and the hand of authority did not bear too heavily on most Virginians. It was an age of change, activity, and promise.

• America's "Historic Triangle" What was life like in the First American Colony... by Absolute History

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