ANTIQUES

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2001

They live in the same neat manner, dress after the same modes, and behave themselves exactly as the gentry in London, most families of any note having a coach, chariot, berlin or chaise.... The habits, life, customs, computations &c of the Virginians are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home.

Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, 1724

Virginia was the site of the first of the English settlements in British North America and by the time of the American Revolution, the largest, most populous, and most valuable of the colonies. When the planter elite attempted to duplicate the way of life and accommodations of the English gentleman they brought a genre representative of the golden age on both sides of the Atlantic--the country house--nearer to perfection than anywhere outside England. Predictably, the very different physical and social conditions in the new world governed their settlements. Early Virginians were quick to adapt new materials and resources for their buildings and to alter traditional forms "to fit the circumstances of our country," as Robert "King" Carter wrote about 1720. At the same time, they looked to English art and architecture as means to overcome their provincial status.

As Hugh Jones noted, many wealthy Virginians perceived themselves to be Londoners and tried to match an extravagant architectural tradition in the wilderness. Jones declared that the buildings in Williamsburg "are justly reputed the best in all the English America, and are exceeded by few of their kind in England." At one end of the town stood "the Capitol, a noble, beautiful, and commodious pile." At the other was the college "beautiful and commodious, being first modelled by Sir Christopher Wren [and] adapted to the nature of the country." However, by early in the twentieth century, the colonial capital had fallen into sad decay.

William A. R. Goodwin, the rector of Bruton Parish Church (1715) in Williamsburg early in the twentieth century, supervised its restoration. When the project was completed in 1907 he published Bruton Parish Church Restored and Its Historic Environment in which he called Williamsburg and its environs "the Cradle of the Republic," and pleaded for the retention of the intangible quality he called the "spirit of the past." This romantic dreamer intended that the whole lower peninsula of Virginia be recognized as the birthplace of the United States, with Williamsburg the focal point.

At a banquet held in New York City in February 1924 Goodwin met John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had the resources to realize Goodwin's dream of restoring the entire eighteenth-century capital of Williamsburg. In the spring of 1926, when Rockefeller spoke at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, Goodwin lured him to Williamsburg, showed him the restoration of the Wythe House then in progress, swamped him with artistic renderings of how the restored town might look, and walked with him in the woods behind Bassett Hall. Rockefeller, obviously impressed, asked to be left alone to go through the town himself. The two men did not meet again until dinner that evening, at which point Rockefeller said he found it an "irresistible" opportunity to restore an entire town and keep it free from "inharmonious surroundings." The next day he told Goodwin that he would authorize him only to hire an architect to prepare drawings depicting a restored Williamsburg. The two men maintained a steady correspondence over the next few months, and by December Rockefeller allowed Goodwin to purchase the historic Ludwell-Paradise House. The basic concept of Colonial Williamsburg was born. Its seventy-fifth anniversary is celebrated in the pages that follow.

The next year Rockefeller consented to underwrite the restoration itself, which he estimated would cost $5 million. To buy up land without triggering a real-estate boom, he concealed his involvement and made Goodwin his agent. The latter referred to his patron by the code name "Mr. David."

The initial Rockefeller plan included preparing notes on the surviving eighteenth-century buildings with an assessment of their relative importance. He envisioned restoring a couple of "centers" such as the capitol area and the Palace Green. Isolated houses were not to be considered. As always, the Rockefeller method was to start slowly, test the concept, and then expand. Eventually, the idea of meticulously restoring the past cast a potent spell over him, and he became engrossed by the minutest details. He told his subordinates: "No scholar must ever be able to come to us and say we have made a mistake."

Rockefeller eventually spent $68 million on Colonial Williamsburg. "I gave more time, thought, and attention to Williamsburg than I did to any other project I ever undertook--far more than I gave to Rockefeller Center," he said. He and his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, bought Bassett Hall, where they spent two months a year and where she created and enhanced her own superlative collection of American folk art. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened Colonial Williamsburg to the public in 1934.