WILLIAMSBURG, VA.- Those who come to Colonial Williamsburg on a nostalgia trip will find some of what they are looking for.

The fife-and-drum corps can still be found marching down Duke of Gloucester Street, whose storefronts are full of costumed interpreters making 18th century wigs, or reenacting the political debates that helped birth the American Revolution.

But approach the stocks and pillories in front of the courthouse to re-create a goofy photo from a long-ago school trip, and you will find the headpieces bolted shut.

They were closed up in the spring of 2020, as a COVID-related measure. And they have remained that way, as Colonial Williamsburg — the world’s largest “living history” museum — rethinks the messages behind a favorite Instagram moment.

“These are friendly stocks,” Matt Webster, the director for architectural preservation, explained on a recent tour (during which he also pointed out the less-than-friendly whipping post nearby).

And not particularly accurate ones, at that. The 18th century stocks would have been higher, smaller and more uncomfortable. “They were meant,” Webster said, “to humiliate.”

The modified stocks are an apt metaphor for today’s Colonial Williamsburg, a 301-acre complex consisting of more than 600 restored or reconstructed 18th century buildings, 30 gardens, five hotels, three theaters, two art museums and a long, tangled history of grappling with questions of authenticity, national identity and what it means to get the past “right.”

After decades of declining attendance and financial instability, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the private entity that owns and operates the site, is rethinking not just some of its structures, but also the stories it tells, adding or expanding offerings relating to Black, Native American and LGBTQ+ history.

And it’s doing so amid a fierce partisan battle over American history, when the date “1776” — emblazoned on souvenir baseball hats on sale here — has become a partisan rallying cry.

Some conservative activists have accused Colonial Williamsburg of going “woke,” a charge also lobbed against Monticello and Montpelier, James Madison’s home. But Cliff Fleet, a former tobacco executive who took over as the foundation’s president and CEO in early 2020, firmly rejects it.

Fleet describes his approach as leaning into Colonial Williamsburg’s longtime mission of presenting “fact-based history,” grounded in rigorous research.

“That’s true to our brand,” he said. “Everything is going to be what actually happened. That’s who we are.”

Recounting “what actually happened” is no simple matter, as any historian will tell you. But when it comes to the state of contemporary Colonial Williamsburg, some facts speak powerfully.

In 2021, the foundation raised a record-breaking $102 million, up 42% from the previous high in 2019. To date, it has collected more than $6 million for the excavation and reconstruction of the First Baptist Church, home to one of the earliest Black congregations in the United States (founded in 1776), and more than $8 million for the restoration of the Bray School, which educated free and enslaved Black children in the 1760s and ’70s.

Those projects have won support across the political spectrum, including from Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In February, the governor — a Republican who on his first day in office signed an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory and other “inherently divisive concepts” in public schools — spoke at an event for the Bray School, citing the need “to teach all of our history, all of it, the good and the bad.”

For some longtime Williamsburg-watchers, the institution’s leadership has deftly steered through today’s choppy political waters by staying true to the past.

“It’s a remarkable shift, but in some ways a return to CW’s original mission,” said Karin Wulf, a historian and the former executive director of the Omohundro Institute, an independent research group at the College of William & Mary.

“The scholarship of decades has shown us this fuller, richer picture of early America,” Wulf said. “It’s diverse, it’s complex, it’s violent. But it’s the real thing.”

A Patriotic Shrine

Colonial Williamsburg has its own complicated founding story. In the 1920s, a local minister persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr. to quietly buy most of the historic area, with the goal of recreating Virginia’s 18th century colonial capital, down to each historically correct brick and nail.

Hundreds of post-1800 structures were dismantled or moved. More than 80 surviving 18th century buildings were restored, while the foundations of more than 500 others were excavated so that painstakingly researched replica structures could be built on top of them.

After World War II, Colonial Williamsburg became a patriotic shrine and “symbol of democracy in the troubled world,” as a top executive put it. The bicentennial brought a new boom, with annual paid attendance peaking in the mid-1980s at 1.1 million visitors, many of whom bedded down in period-style inns (or snapped up authorized colonial-style home products).

But not everyone appreciated the tastefully spick-and-span aesthetic. Writing in The New York Times in 1963, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it a “superbly executed vacuum,” which fostered “an unforgivable fuzziness between the values of the real and the imitation.”

The carefully tended history also stirred criticism, particularly as social history, with its emphasis on ordinary people and marginalized groups, surged in the academy.

In the 1770s, more than half of the town’s 1,800 residents were Black, though visitors to the modern-day re-creation would not always have known it.




“Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot,” the rousing orientation film that started running in the visitors center in 1957, included few Black faces. Even into the 1980s, Black employees in the historic area generally worked as (costumed) custodians, coachmen or cooks — seen but little heard.

“It was a very subservient role,” said Ron Hurst, the senior vice president for education and historic resources. “Consciously or unconsciously, that’s how it was.”

A shift began in 1979, when the foundation introduced “first-person” costumed interpreters portraying ordinary people, white and Black. In 1984, it created a dedicated African American history unit, led by Rex Ellis, who in 2001 became the foundation’s first Black vice president.

But the unit’s work sometimes coexisted uneasily with more traditional presentations. In their 1997 book “The New History in an Old Museum,” anthropologists Richard Handler and Eric Gable described how Black interpreters would raise the fraught subject of interracial relationships, which some white interpreters shied away from as not based on “documented facts.”

Some programs did put the brutal realities of slavery front and center. In 1994, the Black history department organized reenactment of a slave auction, which drew protests from the NAACP and other civil rights groups. And in 1999, as part of a yearlong project called Enslaving Virginia, one performance featured costumed interpreters portraying slave leaders and slave owners, while visitors (who were overwhelmingly white) were cast in the role of the enslaved.

Christy Coleman, a former interpreter who is now executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, organized and performed in the 1994 auction. At the time, she said, “there was a lot of mistrust around what Williamsburg was doing with Black history.” The backlash, she said, “took an emotional toll.”

Coleman said she was impressed by Fleet — whose four degrees from William & Mary include a master’s in history — and his commitment to telling a fuller story.

“In many ways, these are things that are 30 years old, but were never given real legs, and never given financial support by the foundation,” she said.

The current direction also has strong board support, according to Carly Fiorina, the business executive and former Republican presidential candidate, who became the chair in December 2020. A few donors, Fiorina said, were initially “a little concerned” about the LGBTQ+ history programs, which were announced in 2019. But they are grounded in evidence, Fiorina emphasized.

Thomas Jefferson, she said, is “still here.” But now, “you’re going to hear more of the story,” she said. “And you’re going to hear more of the story because it’s true.”

‘You Intentionally Covered It Up’

“True” is a word heard often at Williamsburg, where interpreters — including one portraying Oconostota, an 18th century Cherokee diplomat who came to Williamsburg in 1777 — regularly break character to explain the evidence behind their stories.

The foundation’s audience research, Fleet said, indicates that showing your work helps built trust.

“One of the most important things to do, particularly in this age of polarization, is to let them know how you know,” he said.

The First Baptist Church project exemplifies how Colonial Williamsburg’s storytelling is literally built from the ground up, and rooted in discoveries — and rediscoveries — on site.

In 1953, the foundation bought the church’s mid-19th century building from the congregation (which constructed a new building across town) and demolished it, as was customary with post-1800 buildings. In 1965, the site was paved over and used as a parking lot.

In 1998, James Ingram, a church member working at Colonial Williamsburg, began portraying Gowan Pamphlet, an enslaved man who was among the congregation’s first ministers. But the demolished church remained a point of contention.

Fleet said he decided to move forward with the excavation and reconstruction in early March 2020, after a meeting with Connie Matthews Harshaw, president of the church’s Let Freedom Ring Foundation.

Harshaw was blunt. “I said, ‘You intentionally covered it up, you should intentionally uncover it,’” she recalled.

On a recent tour, Jack Gary, the director of archaeology, described the artifacts excavated so far, including coins, buttons, doll fragments and, near the entrance to the original structure, some 160 straight pins — likely dropped by congregants removing hats and shawls. “Here, it’s the women who are visible,” Gary said.

Last month, at a private meeting, researchers presented DNA testing on remains from some of the roughly 60 gravesites uncovered so far. The whole project, Fleet said, is “descendant-driven,” with permission sought every step of the way.

The Bray School project, a collaboration with William & Mary, is similarly community-driven. Over the decades, Coleman said, Black interpreters regularly talked about the school and its students. But no one knew for sure what had happened to the building.

In 2021, a hunch that it had been moved to the William & Mary campus and incorporated into another building was confirmed. The structure was extracted, and in February it was moved to a site next to the church, in a grand ceremonial occasion.

There were speeches by Youngkin and other dignitaries and, as the modest two-story building rolled back home, a group of schoolchildren holding signs with the names of some of the nearly 400 Black children, free and enslaved, who had studied there.

“It was one of the single most powerful examples of how you can do history like this, in a way that brings people together,” Fleet said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.