Picnic on Palace Green
This is a birds-eye view of the Palace Green in Colonial Williamsburg. It is about ¼ mile long and about 200 feet wide. The roads surrounding it are closed to vehicular traffic, so it is a quiet and calm place. Even in the spring and fall, when Colonial Williamsburg is bustling with tourists, this part of the town is calm. People walk and bike past; others sit on the green, playing with their children or their dogs. Hired carriages glide past, driven by costumed drivers and carrying yet more tourists who want to experience something new and interesting.
The Palace Green is also a place where Tim and I like to have the occasional picnic dinner. We can park about two blocks away (to the left in this picture above) and easily carry our chairs and food. It’s yet another great thing about our town.
Let me tell you what you’re seeing in this picture. At the top of the picture is the Governor’s Palace, the home of seven royal governors and two elected governors of Virginia. You’ll recognize the names of the two elected governors – Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. This is a reconstructed building – the original burned in December of 1781 while the building was being used as a hospital for wounded American soldiers following the siege of Yorktown a couple of months earlier. A public school for the city of Williamsburg was built on the site. When Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin (rector of Bruton Parish Church) was able to persuade philanthropist John D. Rockefeller to fund the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s, the Palace was one of the first reconstructed buildings.
The reconstruction of the Palace and of the green depended a great deal on records left by Thomas Jefferson, the last governor to live in the Palace before the capital was moved to Richmond in 1780. Jefferson was a meticulous record-keeper, and he was planning to remodel the Palace before security concerns led Virginia to relocate its capital. His drawings helped the people reconstructing the building; in addition, his sketches of the gardens and green helped people figure out how these should be restored as well. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see trees arrayed around the edges of the green. Jefferson had drawn circles on the green to illustrate where the trees should be planted, and he even dictated that they should be catalpa trees. They are.
Around the green are several original buildings. They have been restored to the appearance they would have had in the 18th century.
Let’s go clockwise around the green, beginning with Bruton Parish Church:
The original Bruton Parish Church was built in 1683. After the colonial capital moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg in 1699, the demands on the small church increased, and the current church was built in 1730. Among the notable people buried are members of the Tyler and Blair families of colonial Virginia. Edmund Pendleton is also buried there. Here’s the inscription on his tombstone (it’s a large stone):
"Here lies the remains of Edmund Pendleton of Caroline. Born September 9th 1721. Died October 23rd 1803. Author of the Resolution adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of May 15th 1776, instructing the Virginia delegates in the Continental Congress to introduce a bill to declare the colonies free and independent states. He was for twenty-five years, a member of the House of Burgesses; delegate to the Continental Congress; member of all Virginia Conventions of the eighteenth century; President of the Conventions of 1775 and 1776; Chairman of the Committee of Safety; one of the Committee of Five, which revised the laws of Virginia, among them the bill for establishing religious freedom; Speaker of the House of Delegates; first President of the Court of Appeals of Virginia and for many years Vestryman of Drysdale Parish. His remains were removed from his plantation at Edmundsbury and reinterred under this stone in July 1907 by his great-great niece, Charlotte Pendleton. Here also are interred the remains of his two wives and infant child."
His tombstone doesn’t note it, but Edmund Pendleton is my 7th great-uncle; his father, Henry Pendleton (1683-1721) was my paternal 8th great-grandfather. I go visit Uncle Ed occasionally.
The George Wythe House is next to Bruton Parish Church. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about George Wythe:
He became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1754 and helped oversee defense expenditures during the French and Indian War. He opposed the Stamp Act of 1765 and other British taxes imposed on the Thirteen Colonies. He became increasingly alienated from British rule, and represented Virginia in the Second Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence. He was also a delegate to Virginia's 1776 constitutional convention and helped design the Seal of Virginia. Wythe was a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and served on a committee that established the convention's rules and procedures. He left the convention before signing the United States Constitution to tend to his dying wife. He was elected to the Virginia Ratifying Convention and helped ensure that his home state ratified the Constitution.
Wythe served as a judge for much of his life, first as a justice of the peace and then on the Virginia Court of Chancery. He was also a prominent law professor at the College of William & Mary and took on several notable apprentices. He remained particularly close to Jefferson and left Jefferson his substantial book collection in his will. Wythe became increasingly troubled by slavery in his later years and emancipated 4 of his slaves before his death. After Wythe's death in 1806, his grand-nephew was tried and acquitted for Wythe's murder.
Wythe mentored Thomas Jefferson in the law and introduced the young man to the politically powerful men in Williamsburg.
The Governor’s Palace sits at the top of the Palace Green. It is surrounded by outbuildings (kitchens, washhouses, and stables) as it was in the 18th century. The formal and informal gardens in the back of the building have been restored along the lines documented by Jefferson.
If you look to the side of the Palace on the large map above, you’ll see a grayed-out building labeled Matthew Whaley Elementary School. This was the school that Rockefeller built for the City of Williamsburg in exchange for the city allowing him to build the reconstructed Governor’s Palace on the lot where the town’s school sat. Another thing to know about this elementary school – it is named after a 9-year-old boy named Mathew Whaley whose grave is in the Bruton Parish Churchyard. Mathew died in 1706 and was buried near his father, whose father had died five years earlier. After Matthew’s death, his mother, Mary, devoted her efforts to honoring her son by founding a free school for needy children in the community. She went back to England but entrusted the upkeep of the school to Bruton Parish. When she died in 1742, she left 50 pounds to the school, although for a variety of reasons the money wouldn’t be used by the school until 1870. At that time, the community received the money – which had grown to $8,000 – and used it to fund a two-room schoolhouse on the site where the Palace sits today.
The Brush-Everard House sits on the corner of the Palace Green across from the Palace. This house was built in 1718 by John Brush, a gunsmith and armorer who died in 1727. After Brush died, the house went to his daughters, who sold the property to Elizabeth Russell. Elizabeth married Henry Cary in the 1730s; Cary was a builder who was responsible for completing the Governor’s Palace and for building the chapel and president’s house at the College of Williams and Mary. In 1742, the Carys sold the property to William Dering, a painter and dance master. In the mid-1750s, Dering sold the property to Thomas Everard, an English orphan who came to Williamsburg as an apprentice clerk and went on to hold several public appointments as a clerk in Virginia. He also served two terms as Mayor of Williamsburg. I like the way this house — in a very prominent location, next to the Governor’s Palace — was owned first by the gunsmith and then by the builder, the dance master, and finally the clerk over the course of 30 years. I think this tells part of the story of the evolution of the city during that period.
The St. George Tucker House (the blacked-out structure below the picture of the Brush-Everard House on the big map above) sits on Nicholson Street, not on the Palace Green itself, but it’s worth a mention. It actually faced the Palace Green at one point, but when the state government moved to Richmond in 1780, the “Palace” was no longer the center of the city’s activity; rather, the Market Square (where the local courthouse stood) was important. The St. George Tucker House was moved sometime between 1788 and 1789 to its current location (it was not as big then as it is in this picture). St. George Tucker is an interesting fellow. He was born in Bermuda but moved to Williamsburg in 1772 to study law under George Wythe. He served in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution and resumed his legal career in Virginia after the war. He was elected to William Y Mary’s Board of Visitors in 1782, became the College rector in 1789, and became the law professor at the college after George Wythe resigned in 1790. He went on to have a very successfully legal and judicial career. The fact that his first wife was a Randolph and his second wife was a Carter didn’t hurt his career.
The St. George Tucker House now serves as Colonial Williamsburg’s reception for all donors making annual, unrestricted gifts of $250 or more to the Colonial Williamsburg fund.
The James Geddy House and Silversmith Shop sits across from Bruton Parish Church on Palace Green. James Geddy worked as a gunsmith at this location from the time he arrived from Scotland until his death in 1744. His sons carried on his business and added a brass founding business on this lot. In 1760, his son James bought the lot from his mother, established his silversmith and jewelry business there, and built the house that is currently on the lot.
I have some affection for the James Geddy House. In 1997 I had a one-month internship with Colonial Williamsburg, working for John Turner in the Department of Religious Studies (I was researching the Enlightenment for my final project for my MA in history). As part of this internship, I was fitted with colonial garb by the costuming department at CW and helped lead a hymn-sing at the Geddy House on Sunday afternoons. We led tourists in traditional hymns that would have been sung in the 18th century – although they would not have been sung in Bruton Parish Church (which we could see from the window) because at that time it was considered blasphemous to sing anything other than the Psalms in church.
I hope you have enjoyed my tour of Palace Green.