The First College Building, 1695–1705

The first building, an L-shaped structure with a main east wing and a smaller north wing containing the hall and rooms above it, survived only a decade before a fire destroyed all but its exterior walls. It stood a story higher than the more familiar second version of the building; and if, as has so often been claimed, Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of the College building, it would have been this first version that was his creation. The modern conjectural drawing of the east front by William Pavlovsky is perhaps the best representation of the first structure (Fig. 1, Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary). The only known contemporaneous view is a drawing made in 1702 by a Swiss traveler, Franz Ludwig Michel (Fig. 2, Burgerbibliothek, Bern; photograph by Colonial Williamsburg Foundation). A small outline of the building, which appears on a 1699 survey of the proposed town site of the new capital of Williamsburg prepared by Theodorick Bland (Fig. 3, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), documents the completion of only two wings of what was originally intended to be a quadrangle, the wings that were not built being marked by dotted lines.