Stories of early American colonies and revolution are being retold anew in Virginia’s Historic Triangle – importantly, including tales told by Native American and Black voices

Words Jacqui Agate

Winter held Colonial Williamsburg in an iron grip. It had flayed the leaves from the old Compton Oak on Nicholas Street, and chilled the visitors strolling its streets, their collars turned up against the icy wind. Still, the sky was milky blue over the world’s largest living history museum – a neat matrix of buildings that whisks visitors back to the second half of the 18th century, when the air was thick with revolution.

I was striding along Duke of Gloucester Street, the site’s main artery, to meet Trish Thomas of Williamsburg Walking Tours in front of Bruton Parish Church. That prim, red-brick structure with a whitewashed bell tower loomed over us as we chatted.

“This church is 309 years old,” said Trish, who has spent some 30 years guiding history tours in south-east Virginia. “If you hear the church bell ring, it’s the same one that Washington, Jefferson, Rochambeau and Lafayette all heard when they were in town.”

Williamsburg was the capital of the Virginia Colony from 1699 until 1779 – and its bones still creak with history. The first permanent colonial English settlement in the Americas was established in Jamestown, less than 10km away, in 1607 – but a series of devastating fires drove colonial leaders to look for a new seat of government. Williamsburg, then known as the Middle Plantation, was their chosen site – not least because it was home to the renowned College of William and Mary, founded in 1693, whose students would include future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.

“In the late 17th century, a lot of rich and powerful people had moved to Middle Plantation,” explained Trish. “And when the rich and powerful want something, they get it.”

Later, in the 18th century, the city became a hotbed for revolution. In 1781, the home of lawyer George Wythe became then- General George Washington’s headquarters before the Siege of Yorktown. This pivotal battle, fought under 20km to the east, effectively ended the Revolutionary War and won the former colonies’ independence from Britain.

Today, 89 original structures from the 18th and early 19th centuries are preserved across Colonial Williamsburg’s 121 hectares, alongside more than 500 faithful recreations built on original foundations. The ambitious plan to revive the colonial city was hatched in the 1920s by Reverend Dr WAR Goodwin, then rector of Bruton Parish Church. He enlisted the help and financial might of American philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jr and his wife, Abby, who contributed large sums of money to the project. Over the course of a decade, Boston architecture firm Perry, Shaw & Hepburn then painstakingly resurrected the past in wood, bricks and mortar.

Over the decades that followed, the recreated colonial capital became one of southeast Virginia’s premier tourist attractions. By the 21st century, though, visitor numbers were in decline, and the downturn was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But my visit caught Williamsburg and its gargantuan living history museum – plus Virginia’s wider ‘Historic Triangle’, including Yorktown and Jamestown – in the throes of a renaissance. America’s fast-approaching semiquincentennial is reviving interest in the historic site, and a renewed commitment to inclusive storytelling is enticing a new demographic. Trish is optimistic: “With the 250th anniversary of the nation coming up in 2026, it could get very busy again.”

Together we wandered through the site, past porticoed taverns and a stout brick courthouse. I ducked into a recreated milliner’s shop, where a bonneted woman sewed a mantua – a kind of 18th-century dress – surrounded by hats like French pastries. Back on the street, a throng of red-faced runners from William and Mary huffed past us – a reminder that modern life continues lurching forwards outside the time capsule of Colonial Williamsburg.

Eventually we came to a stop before the recreated Capitol building, a formidable structure with a pair of conical towers and a flag-bearing clock tower that pierces the sky like a stake. In front billowed the Grand Union Flag – the predecessor of the modern Star-Spangled Banner, featuring the Union Jack in the canton.

“When Rockefeller came to town there was no building – just a plaque that said: the Capitol used to be here,” Trish said.

“He wanted to bring the building back to this Revolutionary War city.”

There’s something uncanny but hugely enticing about the recreated town – the way it’s dropped into the back alleys of time, suspended somewhere between the past and the present. It’s like a working movie set for a perpetually unfinished film.

Over the years, Colonial Williamsburg has been criticised for painting a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution, and for telling a very white- centric version of history. Certainly, exploring the trim, recreated buildings and watching Revolutionary leaders walk the streets like spectres, the monstrous brutality of colonialism feels sometimes diminished. However, though George Washington and co still currently dominate the narrative, Trish assured me that efforts to share holistic stories are ongoing, and that the historic site’s American Indian Initiative is doing “good, deep work”.

Before the British

Long before the English arrived in Jamestown, this land was occupied by Indigenous peoples. Williamsburg itself was more of a passing place, Trish explained, but there were large Native settlements at surrounding sites. One, which became known as Indian Field Creek, a few miles away on the banks of the York River, was home to the Kiskiack tribe of the Powhatan Confederacy.

As the English ‘conquered’ the land in what is now south-eastern Virginia, they encroached upon Indigenous territories and made misjudged efforts to convert the Powhatan-speaking peoples to Christianity. As the years wore on, relationships between the colonists and the region’s original inhabitants became increasingly fraught, and the early 17th century was marred by ambushes, battles and bloodshed.

Many might not know that the real Pocahontas (whose name was actually Amonute or Matoaka) was one of this region’s Indigenous people – the daughter of chief Powhatan himself. Hers is a story that has been warped and (literally) Disneyfied over the decades; still today, historians cannot agree on some details of her past or her relationship with the English colonist John Smith. But they concur that she was a real Native person who was alive at the time when Jamestown was founded, and that she married settler John Rolfe in 1614.

Such histories are explored with events at Colonial Williamsburg’s American Indian Encampment. “The public can come and talk with us ‘out of character’ as modern day Indigenous people,” I was told by Christopher Custalow, Colonial Williamsburg’s Indigenous Communities Engagement Manager.

“The reason we don’t play a character in that specific space is because most guests are not confident in the histories of Native peoples before, during or even after the 18th century.”
There are renewed efforts to tell the story of Williamsburg’s Black residents too. “Thomas Jefferson would read up to 15 hours per day,” Trish explained as our tour drew to a close. “He had the time to do that because he had enslaved people.”

In the late 18th century, African Americans comprised more than 50% of Williamsburg’s population. I headed to Nassau Street where, in 2020, the foundations of the First Baptist Church, one of the oldest African-American churches in North America, were uncovered. It was formed in the same year as the new nation – 1776 – when a group of free and enslaved Black people began worshipping secretly in a brush arbour at nearby Green Spring Plantation, led by enslaved preacher Gowan Pamphlet. White businessman Jesse Cole reputedly happened across one of these outdoor services and, so the story goes, was so moved that he offered the congregation his Nassau Street carriage house to worship in. (In fact, archaeological evidence suggests that the church may have been constructed by the congregation.) The church was rebuilt once in 1834 after being hit by a tornado. The congregation was then displaced again in the 1950s when Colonial Williamsburg was expanded; the church was razed and its foundations were covered with a parking lot.

Today, the congregation worships in a 1950s structure on Scotland Street. There I met Liz Montgomery, chairperson of the First Baptist Church History Ministry, who showed me a black-and-white photograph in the modern building’s entrance: “This is the church that stood on Nassau Street for 100 years,” she explained.

The original structure was an elegant brick building with rounded windows and a neat, square tower. Liz explained how, in consultation with the First Baptist Church and descendants of the original congregation, the historic church site was excavated, and 63 graves discovered. Three burial sites were selected for DNA testing; usable DNA survived in one set of human remains, confirmed to be of sub-Saharan African descent.

At Scotland Street, church organisers are now planning new exhibits to tell the full story of First Baptist Church. “As we get closer to the 250th anniversary, it’s going to be terribly important for people to come through and learn this history,” said Liz.

The current First Baptist Church will also be a stop on a new African American Heritage Trail, organised by the City of Williamsburg and due to launch in 2026. It will begin in what was the historic Harris Bottom neighbourhood, an African-American community displaced by ‘urban renewal’ in the second half of the 20th century. It will wind through the William and Mary campus, where the Hearth memorial, inscribed with the names of people historically enslaved by the university, was unveiled in 2022.

The trail will also pass the 18th-century Bray School, believed to be the oldest existing building dedicated to the education of Black students in the USA. It was moved from its former location at William and Mary to Colonial Williamsburg in 2023 and, after extensive restoration work, will open to the public this year – another important piece of an evolving historical jigsaw.

Revolutionary road

Eager to continue my historical journey through the region, I left Williamsburg and drove 20km east to the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, on the south bank of the York River. It opened as the Yorktown Victory Center in 1976, as the USA celebrated its bicentennial. Now it “aims to tell the full story of the American Revolution”, according to Kate Gruber, the museum’s former manager of curatorial services.

The museum offers the textbook history of the Revolution in absorbing detail, beginning with a giant court portrait of British King George III in glittering gold coronation robes. Exhibits deep-dive into the British-imposed taxes that sparked discontentment in the colonies, and there’s a dramatic 4D film offering an explosive depiction of the Siege of Yorktown, fought just steps away. The galleries continue through to 1776, and a pedestalled statue of George Washington. As she guided me through the galleries, though, Kate was keen to dive into the finer details, pausing before artefacts and interactive displays to deliver lively historical anecdotes.

At the foot of an early iteration of one of America’s founding documents, she pointed out a curious detail: the name of a female Baltimore printer. “Mary Katharine Goddard has taken over the running of the printing press from her late husband, and she gets what’s effectively the first federal contract in the United States,” Kate explained. “She prints at least 13 copies of the official Declaration of Independence, including the names of all the signatories – and guess what: she adds her own name.

“It can be really difficult to get our visitors to connect with people they see on a pedestal,” Kate added. “But these are the hidden, personal stories that visitors learn when they come to the museum. That’s why these artefacts are so important.”

Throughout, Kate was keen to press the enduring relevance of this historical moment in both the run-up to the 2026 anniversary, and in a year of particular political significance.

“Something that people should understand is that the American Revolution is not a fait accompli,” she explained. “It’s an organic experiment that we’re continuing to hone and refine.

“In our galleries we’re telling our visitors about all the hot and heavy political debates,” she continued. “How big should government be? What’s the role of government in your everyday life? Should government have a role in your everyday life? These conversations didn’t originate in the 20th and 21st centuries – they’re just conversations that we are continuing.”

As we left, Kate stopped before one last artefact – a sandstone ferry marker from the early 19th century, engraved with an eagle and a single word: “Liberty”. Rivers were the highways of the new United States, Kate explained, vital as the nascent nation expanded west. But in traditional narratives of that expansion, she said, Indigenous voices haven’t always been at the fore.

“What I’m hoping will be done as we move towards the 250th anniversary is that these galleries are refreshed to help people understand that this isn’t a story of manifest destiny,” she added. “It’s a story of mutual impact. This is everyone’s story.”