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.

The Second Building and Its Dependencies, ca. 1740

By 1709 the College trustees began to make arrangements for rebuilding the original structure on the original foundation and surviving walls. Work got under way soon thereafter, and by the mid1710s the work was nearly completed. By the 1 720s James Blair began a strong effort to complete the faculty and secure the transfer of the charter, which he accomplished by 1729. In the process a second building, the Brafferton, was completed in 1723 to house the Indian School and ultimately the College library. Then, by 1732 a chapel formed the south wing of the Main Building, and almost immediately thereafter work began on the President’s House, which was ready for Blair’s occupancy by the following year.

Illustrations from the eighteenth century of these buildings are almost as scarce as those for the first building, but there is a famous one, an engraved copper plate found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in late 1929 that is now in the possession of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. One portion of the engraving, which dates from about 1740, shows a front view of the three College buildings and suggests, too, the formal garden without trees that occupied the front campus for the remainder of the colonial era (Fig. 4, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation). Elsewhere on the plate there is a view of the rear of the Main Building (Fig. 5, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) . The only other known view of the Main Building from the colonial era appears as a detail in a portrait ofJames Blair, completed late in his life by Charles Bridges (Fig. 6, Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary).

The Attempt to Complete the Quadrangle

In spite of the approaching crisis of the American Revolution, the College experienced a brief period of prosperity in the early 1770s. The last royal governor, John Murray, earl of Dunmore, asked Thomas Jefferson to prepare a plan for completing the College building as a quadrangle that would have essentially doubled its size (Fig. 7, original in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Colonial Williamsburg Foundation photograph). Jefferson’s plan is also the principal source for identifying the specific uses of the classrooms on the first floor of the original building.

Work began on the new construction, but it was never completed. In the course of archaeological excavations carried out as part of the restoration of the building by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the foundations for the Jeffersonian extension were uncovered, including those outside the west entrance to the Great Hall (Fig. 8, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation).

The Post-Revolutionary Campus

With the College frequently battling for its survival from the 1 780s into the nineteenth century, no new construction was undertaken before the Civil War, and the appearance of the campus did not significantly change. In November 1781 the President’s House had burned while being used as a hospital for French officers following the Yorktown campaign, but it was rebuilt without major alterations. An engraving of John Randolph’s room while he was a student at the College in 1792 suggests the simplicity of accommodations afforded students (Fig. 9, College of William and Mary Archives).

Of the surviving illustrations of the College in the antebellum era, one of the most appealing and most representative of the rural character of the campus is a Thomas Millington lithograph of about 1840 (Fig. 10, College of William and Mary Archives). There are several versions of the lithograph, all based upon a wash drawing, also extant, by Millington, who was the son of a faculty member, John Millington.

The Second Version of the main Building, ca. 1858

This daguerreotype of the second building, taken about 1858, is the last known depiction of the structure before a destructive fire on February 8, 1859, left standing only its outer walls to the second floor. The building had been recently repaired, and the large columns supporting the balcony were a post-Revolutionary addition. Yet, the east front of the building retained much of its original appearance almost a century and a half after its construction (Fig. 11, College of William and Mary Archives).

The Short-Lived Third Building

After the 1859 fire, a third and much-altered Main Building with twin Italianate towers was constructed on the surviving walls. The lithograph shows its general appearance from the east front, although the roadway and the campus scene are almost certainly fanciful (Fig. 12, College of William and Mary Archives) . One of two extant drawings by L. J. Cranstone shows the building from the vicinity of Richmond Road with the President’s House and dependencies in the foreground (Fig. 13, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) . The third building had a very brief history, for it was burned on September 9, 1862, by Union soldiers who were occupying the campus.

The Campus after the Civil War

Despite the precarious condition of the College after the Civil War, President Benjamin Ewell was able to reopen the institution in October 1865, using the Brafferton and the President’s House, both of which had sustained only slight damage. By October 1869 a new Main Building, constructed once again on the surviving walls of the earlier buildings, was completed. This fourth building continued in use for almost six decades, until the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation began the restoration of the second building in 1928.

A photograph, taken sometime between 1869 and about 1874, shows the new structure flanked by the two surviving original buildings, to both of which porches had been added (Fig. 14, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation). An addition to the President’s House had also been constructed in 1865, when the Main Building was in ruins. Students were much in evidence around the fourth building shortly after its completion (Fig. 15, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), but the College remained closed for lack of students from 1882 to 1888.