One semester several years ago, Terry L. Meyers was on a research leave, waiting to correct page proofs for three volumes of letters by Algernon Charles Swinburne—"the bad boy of Victorian poetry,” as Mr. Meyers likes to think of him. The proofs never showed up, to Mr. Meyers’s distress, but soon the semester took a surprising turn away from Victoriana: Mr. Meyers discovered that a nondescript house squeezed onto the edge of the College of William & Mary’s campus could be the country’s oldest surviving school building for black children, one with ties to Benjamin Franklin as well as to the college.
The house, now an annex for the college’s ROTC program, has over the years been expanded, moved a block, renovated, and expanded again. Its exact age won’t be known until experts tear into the walls to see if the wood in the beams and posts can be accurately dated, and even then it may never be certain that this is the building that housed an otherwise well-documented school for the religious education of black children in the early 1760s. But so far, evidence in its favor seems strong.
If Mr. Meyers were a young historian, such a discovery could be a career maker. But he’s a 65-year-old English professor whose career was long since made—he’s been at William & Mary 40 years now, with assorted books and articles about Swinburne and others to his credit, along with a stint as English-department chair. Nevertheless, the house has clearly piqued Mr. Meyers’s curiosity. “I’ve told people I’m not going to retire,” he says with a grin, “until that building is interpreted and restored.”
The building’s possible role as a schoolhouse is particularly interesting because William & Mary, like a number of other colleges in the South, owned slaves—among them two children, Adam and Fanny, whom the faculty sent to the school in 1769. And while some faculty members, including two 18th-century presidents, were early advocates of religious instruction for black children, a 19th-century president, Thomas R. Dew, was one of slavery’s most influential intellectual proponents. “His defense of slavery is like Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal,’” Mr. Meyers says, “only with no sense of irony.”
Mr. Meyers has been among those most interested in uncovering the college’s slaveholding past. In addition to slaves who lived and worked on the campus, a number of slaves grew tobacco on a 2,119-acre plantation the college owned from 1718 to 1780. And some students brought slaves with them. More embarrassing, at least to many people, is that President Dew’s remains were brought from Paris to be reburied on the campus in 1939, when he was eulogized in what Mr. Meyers says were glowing terms.
More recently, though, William & Mary has been taking a new look at its history. Last year the Board of Visitors approved a long-term research effort, the Lemon Project, named after an 18th-century slave. The aim is to “understand the role of race in our history and how to move forward with that shared understanding,” as the provost, Michael R. Halleran, put it recently.
“No one ever uses the word ‘reparations,’ but some have an idea that scholarships might be in order,” Mr. Meyers says, noting that some local families may be descended from slaves owned by the college.
Oddly enough, the discovery of the 18th-century schoolhouse—if indeed it is a discovery—owes a lot to Mr. Meyers’s longstanding interest in the 19th century, and to how little of it can be seen in Williamsburg today. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation used John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s fortune to buy and demolish hundreds of post-1800 buildings so that a semblance of the earlier state capital could be recreated. “When I came here in 1970,” Mr. Meyers says, “the 19th century was gone. I decided to watch out for it.”
While Mr. Meyers was waiting for his page proofs, he took up “a chatty history” called Williamsburg Facts & Fiction: 1900-1950, which mentioned an 18th-century “Brown Hall” that had been owned by Dudley Digges and had been moved to the college’s campus. The name “Dudley Digges” was familiar—Mr. Meyers had been to the restored Dudley Digges house in Yorktown, Va., which had belonged to a Revolutionary patriot. But no one Mr. Meyers asked knew of a Dudley Digges house in Williamsburg. As for Brown Hall, the college has a substantial brick dorm by that name, but it was built in the early 1930s.
Mr. Meyers began checking with research librarians. After months of sleuthing, he concluded that what one writer had remembered as “a little vine-clad, single-story frame house” at the corner of Prince George and North Boundary Streets was now the ROTC annex a block away—a two-story building that Mr. Meyers had often visited back when it served as faculty housing for a friend of his. Aerial photographs taken May 8, 1930, even showed it being moved to its current location. At that point, the house had been in use for several years as a dormitory for about a dozen Methodist women—it was the original Brown Hall.
From the few property records that had survived, he also concluded that the Dudley Digges associated with the house was not the Revolutionary patriot but a cousin—one of at least five 18th-century Virginians of the same name. Old newspaper stories referred to the Williamsburg Dudley Digges house as dating to 1717, a date that fit with records saying the lot was first sold in 1712.
Mr. Meyers got really interested when he realized that the house might be the building that a Dudley Digges rented from at least 1763 to 1765 to Anne Wager, a Williamsburg schoolmistress hired in 1760 by an English philanthropy to operate a school for black children, both free and enslaved. The philanthropy, the Associates of Dr. Bray, was named for Thomas Bray, an English preacher who had pushed for the education of black and Indian children in the colonies. In 1760 the association invited Benjamin Franklin—then Pennsylvania’s agent in London—to become a member, and it was Franklin who suggested that a new school be established Williamsburg.
Previous researchers had supposed that Franklin recommended Williamsburg because a printer friend, William Hunter, was the Williamsburg postmaster, but Mr. Meyers broke new ground here too. He connected the recommendation to a 1756 visit Franklin made to William & Mary, where he would have met President Thomas Dawson and learned that Dawson had a longstanding interest in making sure that black children were taught to be proper Christians.
The school, which opened in 1760, was so successful that Mrs. Wager taught as many as 30 children at a time. All of them learned to read and the girls learned to sew. The rules required that the children walk regularly “from her School House, where they are all to be first assembled, in a decent & orderly Manner to Church"—in this case Bruton Parish Church, which still stands. Franklin, Mr. Meyers notes, visited Williamsburg again in 1763, and “very likely” met Mrs. Wager and her students. Records show that after the school had rented the Digges house for a few years, an agent of the Associates of Dr. Bray complained that it was “much too small for such a Number of children.” The school moved elsewhere, only to close for good in 1774, when Mrs. Wager died.
Daniel Kurt Ackermann, a William & Mary alumnus who is now a preservation expert, completed a report on the house for the college last year. “Until further evidence comes to light,” he wrote, “it is impossible to establish firmly and without a doubt the location of the Bray School in Williamsburg.” On the other hand, he added, if evidence did turn up proving that the house was the Bray School, “this would be one of the most important finds in Williamsburg.”
Mr. Meyers has fewer reservations and plenty of enthusiasm. He proposes an archaeological dig in the garden behind the current Brown Hall. He doesn’t expect to find “a slate that says ‘Property of the Bray School,’” he says, but he thinks chances are good that something would be unearthed that could provide additional clues. He would also like to see the house itself—now an awkward jumble of small rooms decorated with ROTC posters—returned to its 18th-century appearance and moved to a more visible location.
Mr. Meyers is quick to say that the point of educating black children in 18th-century Williamsburg wasn’t to enable them to escape slavery but to help them understand that they were part of God’s divine plan no matter what their situation. Still, he says, any education for blacks in the 18th century “was a positive thing.” While the college’s slave-holding past was appalling over all, he says, the fact that a William & Mary president’s interest in educating black children led Ben Franklin to suggest establishing a Bray School here is an important footnote to colonial history—a footnote that would be well represented by a restored schoolhouse that visitors could tour.
And then, of course, Mr. Meyers could retire.
