Stop 2 of my campus tour focuses on the Wren Yard and the three oldest buildings of the college – the President’s House, the Brafferton, and the Wren Building (red square marked with “2” on the map above. We know what this area of the campus looked like in the 18th century because of an extraordinary discovery made in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England.
In the late 1920s, W. A. R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, had convinced John D. Rockefeller to provide the money to restore Williamsburg to its 18th-century appearance. Efforts to restore the Wren Building had begun in 1928, but in 1929 Reverend Goodwin’s daughter, Mary, discovered a copperplate in the Bodleian Library that she recognized as depicting several buildings in Williamsburg, including the College Yard, the Capitol, and the Governor’s Palace. The story goes that Mary telegraphed her father, basically telling him what she had found and telling him to stop whatever he was doing until she could return with the plate.
The plate is now owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and has occasionally been on display in the Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg. I remember being in the museum one day and rounding a corner to find myself eye-to-eye with the Bodleian Plate. I don’t gasp very often but I gasped when I saw this plate. The image below is an engraving made from the plate.
I’m going to talk about the two side buildings before I talk about the Wren Building. I don’t have personal stories to share about the two side buildings, but I want to tell you about them anyway.
The President’s House (on the right in the plate above) dates from 1733 and is the oldest official residence for a college president in the United States. All but one of the 28 presidents of the college has lived in this house; James Blair, named the college’s first president in 1693, was president until 1743. The only president who didn’t live in the house was Robert Saunders, who chose to stay in his own home during his tenure from 1846-1848.
During the American Revolution, it was occupied by British and French forces during the Battle of Yorktown. In 1781, during the last weeks of the American Revolution, General Cornwallis and his British forces evicted William & Mary President James Madison (cousin of the future American president) and his family from the house, set up headquarters there, and even refused the W&M president the courtesy of drawing water from his own well. Fire destroyed the interior of the structure a few weeks after Cornwallis departed, while the house was being used as a hospital for French officers wounded at the Battle of Yorktown. President Madison wrote, "I have not a book left since the conflagration of the house in which I lived."
By 1786 the President's House had been rebuilt with funds allocated by the French government. Other fires occurred in 1879, 1916, and 1922, but little of the exterior has changed in the past 250 years. The house was restored to its colonial appearance in 1931 as part of the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg by the Rockefeller Foundation. Since then, the building has undergone several modernizations, including the addition of closets and bathrooms, an updated kitchen, modern heating and air conditioning, and upgraded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. The public rooms on the first floor are open for ceremonial occasions, although I haven’t been in the building in decades.
The Brafferton, built in 1723, sits directly across the yard from the President’s House. Here’s what the college website says about this building:
There might not have been an Indian School at William & Mary had it not been for a provision in the will of Sir Robert Boyle, the famous English scientist who died in 1691, two years before W&M was chartered.
In his will, Boyle provided that £4,000 sterling should be employed for "pious and charitable uses." Boyle's executors decided to use the funds to purchase Brafferton Manor in Yorkshire, England, and they designated part of the rents paid by the manor's tenants to be given annually to support the Indian School at William & Mary, while another part would go to the Indian School at Harvard College in Massachusetts.
It was most likely in response to the Boyle bequest that language was added to the Royal Charter to list as one of the William & Mary’s missions "that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God...." In return for annual payments from Boyle's executors, W&M would keep "soe many Indian children in Sicknesse and health, in Meat, drink, Washing, Lodgeing, Cloathes, Medicine, books and Education from the first beginning of Letters till they are ready to receive Orders and be thought Sufficient to be sent abroad to preach and Convert the Indians."
Royal Governor Francis Nicholson (1698–1705) enthusiastically anticipated that if "any great [Indian] nation will send 3 or 4 of their children thither" they could be trained in British ways and then "sent back to teach the same things to their own people."
In the beginning, classes were held in temporary quarters and later in the Wren Building; the boys lived with families in town until the Brafferton – funded by the Boyle estate – was constructed in 1723. The school continued, frequently with just a handful of students, until the Boyle funds were discontinued at the time of the American Revolution.
The Virginia colonists tried several strategies for recruiting Indian boys. Governor Nicholson instructed colonists who traded with Indian tribes to look for suitable Indian students. Later, Virginia officials negotiating treaties with Indian tribes such as the Tuscarora, Chickahominy and Catawba tried to convince the native leaders to send boys to the school. Students came from both local "tributary" tribes—such as the Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and Nansemond who lived fairly close to Williamsburg and paid tribute to the colony—and more distant tribes, including the Catawba in North Carolina, the Cherokee in the southern Appalachian mountains, and the Delaware and Wyandot of the Ohio River Valley. Enrollment reached a height of 24 students in 1712, but declined to eight in 1754 and stayed at about that level until the school closed.
Some Native American groups sent their sons to be educated in Williamsburg because they wanted to maintain good relations with the colony. Through the deerskin trade, the English colonists provided them with weapons, cloth, and other goods and materials that the Indians could not make themselves. The Indians wanted envoys who could speak English and understand the colonists' culture. Initially, many of the students at William & Mary’s Indian School were purchased from frontier traders, or sent to Williamsburg as diplomatic hostages to ensure peace with potentially hostile tribes.
The Indian Master was frequently a man who had been educated at William & Mary; several had previously been ushers—or assistants to the master—in W&M's classical grammar school. While many of the Indian Masters saw their job only as a stepping stone to greater things, such as a position as minister in a local church, some, such as Emmanuel Jones, held the post for many years. The Indian Master lived with the boys at the Indian School and was permitted to take in white students whom he tutored for a fee.
The Indian School at William & Mary cannot be counted a success by the standards of the Englishman. It failed in the goal of Anglicizing and Christianizing the native populace. As soon as the Indian students left the school, the colonists complained, they abandoned the behaviors they learned at the Brafferton and resumed Indian ways of life. Worse yet, from the colonists' point of view, some Indians used their knowledge of English not to help the Virginians but to defend their tribes' cultures and well-being.
From the Indian perspective, the school may be seen as somewhat more successful. To be sure, many students never returned to their tribes, and a strange diet as well as exposure to European diseases for which they had no immunity sickened and killed several students, especially in the school's early years. But the school's alumni also proved to be invaluable to their native communities. John Nettles, for example, helped his tribe in North Carolina by reading the treaties that the British wrote, and by serving as an interpreter between the Catawba and the British. In the end, the Indian School had the opposite effect to the one intended. Instead of convincing Indians to become good Englishmen, it allowed the Indians to learn enough about British culture to defend their old ways of life.
Since the end of the American Revolution and the dissolution of the Indian School, the Brafferton has been used in various ways – as a dining hall, faculty residence, dormitory, and classroom building. By the 1960s, the building was being used by the alumni society.
Unlike both the President’s House and the Wren Building, the Brafferton was never damaged by fire. However, it was damaged during the Civil War, when much of the wood in the interior was removed and used as firewood. This building was also restored to its colonial appearance in 1932 as part of the Rockefeller restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. Today, the building houses the offices of the college president and provost.
The Wren Building is the dominant structure on this part of the campus. Constructed between 1695 and 1700, it is the oldest college building still standing in the United States and the oldest restored public building in Williamsburg. In 1691 the Reverend James Blair, official representative of the Church of England in Virginia, went to London to secure a charter for the college. On February 8, 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II granted a charter to the college. The college was to consist of three schools: a grammar school for boys from 12 to 15 years old; the philosophy school, where students would study moral and natural philosophy (arts and sciences, in modern terms), and the divinity school, where young men who had completed their studies in philosophy would be prepared to be ordained in the Church of England.
The building housed students and classrooms, a dining room, a library, a faculty room, and living quarters for the president and professors. The basement held a kitchen and servants’ rooms. It was only in 1724 that a mathematics professor at the college, Hugh Jones, described the building as being designed by Christopher Wren, the famous London architect. There is no evidence that Wren had anything to do with this building; nonetheless, the building was officially renamed for Wren in 1931.
When Thomas Jefferson was Governor of the Colony of Virginia in 1780, he had plans to expand and reform the College. Here’s what Jefferson sketched:
The black walls are the original building; Jefferson’s plan was to extend the wings that housed the Chapel and The Great Hall and then build the fourth wall, creating a quadrangle that would be the basis of the college. When the Virginia General Assembly refused to approve his plans, Jefferson took his ideas with him to Charlottesville (near his home at Monticello) where he formed his own “academical village” – the University of Virginia.
The Wren Building was gutted by fire several times as well; in 1705, 1859, and 1862 (when Union soldiers quartered in Williamsburg set fire to it). It was restored to its colonial appearance by the Rockefellers in 1931. Today the building is used as an academic building, housing both faculty offices and classrooms. It is currently the home of the Department of Religious Studies.
I have many personal connections to the Wren Building.
On the rear portico of the building you’ll find an array of marble plaques; the one I want to call your attention to is the plaque that lists what are called the “priorities” of William and Mary. This plaque was the reason for my first interaction with the Wren Building; during “Duc Week” (induction week, the freshman orientation period before classes began), freshman were required to memorize this list. Any upperclassman on campus was authorized to stop freshmen (identifiable because they had to wear a “duc” cap) and ask them to recite the priorities. I was asked to do this a couple of times.
Also during Freshman orientation week, we were taken in small groups into the Wren Chapel, where we signed the college Honor Code. As the priorities list had taught us, William and Mary was the first college to have an Honor Code. Here’s what the Wren Chapel looks like today. It’s not very different from what it looked like 60 years ago.
Tim and I were in the Freshman English class together in the Wren Building during our first semester in college. The class originally met on the main level of the building, but it moved to the basement, in the old kitchen. Here’s what that room looks like today. It looked pretty much like this when we had class there, except the tables were rotated 90 degrees and I think the walls were darker.
During our freshman year, we also learned about one of the traditions of the college – the Yule Log Ceremony, which takes place in the Great Hall of the Wren Building. After an outdoor ceremony (which includes some musical entertainment and, in recent years, the president of the college reading The Night Before Christmas, attendees at this ceremony file through the Great Hall, grab some hot cider, and pick up yule springs to toss into the fire roaring in the fireplace. The idea is that when you toss your piece of greenery into the fireplace, you are getting rid of all the bad things that happened during the year. Over the years, we have attended a number of events in the Great Hall, including banquets, reunion class parties, and wedding receptions.
During my sophomore year, my English class met in the Wren Attic. I don’t remember much about this class except that we read Milton and I kind of liked it. One thing I do remember is that I had to declare a major during the second semester of this year, and I was torn between English and Economics. I knew I was getting back an English essay and an Economics test on the same day just before the deadline, so I decided I would major in whatever subject I got the higher grade. I got a B on the English paper and an A- on the Economics test, so I decided to major in Economics. Thus do 19-year-olds make life-altering decisions. The picture below is from 1960, and the classroom didn’t look much different six years later, although I don’t remember the desks being like this. I do remember that the un-airconditioned room in the attic was hot in the spring in the South.
And most memorably, our graduation ceremony was held in the Wren Yard on June 6, 1969. We don’t have a picture of our actually receiving our diplomas.
Most recently, we “re-graduated” from the Wren Yard in 2019 as part of the festivities for our 50th reunion celebration. This event marked our transition into The Olde Guarde – alumni of the college more than 50 years past their graduation year.
I hope you enjoyed Stop 2 of my tour. Join me next Friday for Stop 3 – Washington Hall.
Great history. Great life story.
This is fun…thanks!