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School building for Black children in 1700s moves to Colonial Williamsburg

The Bray School building has served multiple purposes on the William & Mary campus

February 10, 2023 at 4:18 p.m. EST
An 18th-century building that once housed the Williamsburg Bray School, travels Friday from the campus of William & Mary to Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area. The structure is likely the oldest extant building in the United States dedicated to the education of Black children. (Stephen Salpukas/ William & Mary)
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Janice Canaday couldn’t sleep Thursday night. She was nervous.

She went out early the next morning, alongside crowds to watch an 18th-century building slowly, cautiously transported through town to new prominence in Colonial Williamsburg.

Over the years on the William & Mary campus, it had been overlooked, covered over, forgotten, moved out of the way. Finally a professor rediscovered, and other scholars later confirmed, the original Williamsburg Bray School. It could be the oldest extant building in the country where Black children were taught in the years before the American Revolution, an extraordinary site that historians hope will broaden and deepen our understanding of the nation’s formative years, and the experiences of those who lived through them.

“It was right there in plain sight,” said Canaday, who grew up in Williamsburg, just as generations of her ancestors did. “It made me wonder about other parts of our story that are sealed up or covered up in the same way.”

The Bray School on William & Mary's campus was moved very slowly by truck to Colonial Williamsburg, Va. on Feb. 10. (Video: William & Mary)

On Friday, that rediscovered building was being moved — verrrry carefully — to a new site in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area. There the school will sit near the old First Baptist Church, one of the country’s oldest African American congregations.

In graves of a lost Black cemetery at First Baptist Church, hope for links to family history

“History is unfolding right before our eyes,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the William & Mary Bray School Lab, thrilled and nervous about the move. “Everyone … recognizes the power of this moment.”

The power, people involved in the project say, is that many more people will now get to hear the story of the Bray School, and consider a pivotal time in American history from the perspective of the children educated there.

The Williamsburg Bray School, one of many founded by an Anglican charity based in England to bring religion to enslaved people, sought to teach Black children what to think and how to behave. It was open from 1760 to 1774.

One of the most amazing things about the Bray School story, said Matt Webster, executive director of the Grainger department of architectural preservation and research at Colonial Williamsburg, is it defies logic. “It tests what we know about slavery in the 18th century, about education in the 18th century. It’s also a very powerful story about education, and the power of education: Once you educate someone, you can’t really control what they do with that.”

Elgersman Lee thinks of the children learning to read over the 14 years of the school’s existence, and how they might have passed that knowledge on to others. On documents scholars have long known about, the originals housed at the University of Oxford, the children ranging in age from 3 to 10 years old are referred to as scholars.

That gave them new identities, said Elgersman Lee. “Many were chattel, some were free, but they were also scholars.”

After the school closed in Williamsburg, the building known as the Bray-Digges House was modernized and expanded and largely forgotten. It housed families and students. Electricity was added, and new wings, the interior was stripped and plaster and new trim added on.

In the 1930s, the whole building was moved to make way for a William & Mary dorm.

Generations later, an English professor at William & Mary, Terry Meyers, became curious about references to an early school, and over time uncovered documents and other clues suggesting the small white house on campus might be the site.

The documents and physical evidence weren’t aligning, Webster said. But in 2020, a partnership between William & Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation allowed them to do an invasive investigation and use dendrochronology to determine that the wooden planks in the building dated back very precisely to the time when the school was established.

At William & Mary, a school for free and enslaved Black children is rediscovered

Since then, people have been carefully working to remove, document and preserve modern additions to the building, and study original elements such as roof shingles and trim that were reused, often tacked on in renovations. Those give preservationists a guide to restore the lines and details of the school.

Signs of people who moved through the building are found throughout, Webster said. There are fingerprints — and a paw print, and a hoof mark — in the handmade bricks, and tool marks in planks. In the staircase, which is original, “there’s a little 18th-century nail shoved by somebody’s finger under the stair tread — very clearly because it was squeaking.”

Spectators gathered as the Bray School, the country's oldest extant building that taught Black children, was moved from William & Mary's campus on Feb. 10. (Video: William & Mary)

Archaeologists and students excavated the lawn behind the original site, and found artifacts such as slate pencils and an abundance of marbles.

The building has some original windows, not as smooth as modern glass, with tiny air bubbles embedded; Elgersman Lee likes to think of the students looking through them, and wonders what they saw.

“As they’re learning different words — like liberty and freedom — and they’re looking through the glass,” she said, “ … what are they thinking?”

The building is telling of the world the students lived in, Webster said. “In some cases, this is the only surviving documentation of people who don’t exist in a written record.”

So the idea of moving the structure — and the potential impact of a jolt on the road on a fragile chimney, or the movement of a plank rubbing out a fingerprint on a brick — had many anxiously awaiting its safe transfer.

“We erase that fingerprint, we’ve erased that story,” Webster said. “That’s pretty nerve-racking.”

Specialized movers, working with engineers, stabilized the building. They put big steel beams underneath where it needed support, Webster said. Then they slowly lifted it onto a trailer that was later hitched to a truck that would roll it down the street.

Crews had already removed some road signs along the route and cut low branches, made sure no cars were parked along the way, and put rolling road closures in place Friday.

In coming months, artisans at Colonial Williamsburg will work to restore the building to the way it looked as a school; visitors will see carpenters making siding, joiners making doors, blacksmiths making nails and hinges and locks.

It is expected to open in 2024, 250 years after the Bray School closed.

Scholars at William & Mary will continue to seek documents and descendants; a genealogist is expected to join the staff soon, an oral historian will record memories. They have 86 names of students, and believe there were hundreds more.

Teddi Ashby, who lives in Philadelphia, was told growing up that her father’s ancestors were free people who were educated. On a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, she learned the story of Matthew Ashby, a free Black man who bought his wife out of slavery in the 1700s.

When she saw a letter listing students at the Bray school — most enslaved, and then a line, and the names of her ancestors, three children who were free — she put her hand on the screen, touching the image of the document.

“You close your eyes, throw yourself back a couple of hundred years,” she said. “It’s really a great feeling.”

Tonia Cansler Merideth, a descendant who will help document those stories for the Bray School Lab, said the project brings to mind a word from Ghana, sankofa, going back to fetch, seeking the past. “There’s one thing we forgot,” she said. “The Bray School, and it’s coming home.”

On Friday, Canaday walked alongside the building as it inched along the road, alongside crowds of people watching the spectacle. “I hope they’ll come back to hear those stories, about those little feet, those people that were inside that space,” Canaday said.

“It’s not a Black story. It’s an American story,” she said. “We were all impacted by it. We are all a part of it.”