Stop by the corner of Prince George and Boundary streets on almost any morning and you’re likely to see the old brick walks busy with pedestrian traffic.
Curious tourists shuffle past between Merchants Square and the Historic Area, mixing with sleepy students walking from their dorm at old Brown Hall to classes at the College of William and Mary.
Step back in time 250 years, however, and you would have seen some 30 black kids ages 3 to 10 lining up for a day of instruction in reading, writing, religion and deportment.
Founded in 1760 by the college and an Anglo-American missionary group whose trustees included Benjamin Franklin, the pioneering Bray School touched the lives of several hundred young blacks over its 14 years, helping give Williamsburg a population of slaves and freemen who were unusually literate.
And now archaeologists from Colonial Williamsburg and the college are probing the yard around Brown Hall looking for evidence of its presence.
Among their discoveries is a brick-lined well that may have provided the students with water. They’ve also unearthed signs of a post-in-ground structure that may have served as their kitchen.
Equally evocative are the slate pencils and marbles that have emerged as the scientists have sifted through deposits of churned-up fill. Though stripped of their original context — and therefore of no value in proving any link to the school’s past — they still smack of a world inhabited by children.
“It’s very tantalizing,” says Rockefeller Library fellow Julie Richter, a W&M history lecturer who is studying the scant documentary trail left by the school’s pupils.
“And it’s exactly what they should be finding.”
Beginning in late May with ground-penetrating radar, the students of the W&M-Colonial Williamsburg summer field school have probed more than 16 inches below the surface in the south yard, uncovering first the undulating rows of a 1920s field and then the colonial occupation layer.
Numerous postholes mark the footprint of a post-in-ground outbuilding that may date to the Bray School period, CW archaeologist Mark Kostro says. But the scatter of 1700s slate pencils and marbles was recovered from such a roiled-up deposit that — despite the fact that much of it came from the 1930 excavation of Brown Hall’s basement — its reliability as evidence is tainted.
“We’re getting lots of stuff that tells you about the landscape and how it was organized,” Kostro says.
“But the problem with the artifacts is that they come from a disturbed context with 200 years of occupation instead of the 5 to 10 years the school was here.”
Similar problems have dogged the excavation of the well discovered on the opposite side of the dorm.
Though the construction methods look right for the 1700s or 1800s, the widely varied dates of the artifacts found inside have made its exact age elusive.
“We were very excited when we hit a layer of 18th-century artifacts,” William and Mary archaeologist Neil Norman says. “But when we hit a modern bottle we knew we were still dealing with mixed fill.”
Despite such promising discoveries, the dig will shut down in early August.
But Norman hopes to return and probe the well more deeply if the college can find funding for a job that requires extensive engineering measures.
“Digging a well can be expensive,” he says. “But in terms of potential, this one is really dynamite.”
Until then, more light could be shed by a planned investigation of a wood-frame structure located just a block away.
Moved from the Brown Hall site in 1930, the building was overlooked until 2011, when William and Mary English professor Terry Meyers — after persistent research — discovered evidence that points to the much enlarged, much altered house as the first home of the Bray School.
“We couldn’t see it at first. But then it struck me that if you cut off the appended sections on the sides and change the roof — you have an 18th-century structure,” Meyers says.
“If the evidence holds up — it’s the oldest extant building in America associated with black education.”
Equally important is the new information Meyers found regarding the school’s links to the college.
Though most histories credit Franklin’s long friendship with Williamsburg postmaster and printer William Hunter as the reason behind his nomination of the town as a site for a new school, Franklin’s recommendation specifically notes the support of the college president, too.
Both Thomas Dawson and his brother, William — who was W&M’s previous head — had long records of encouraging black education, Meyers says. And Franklin met them when he came to receive an honorary degree 4 years before the Bray School was founded.
“What fascinates me is how this could have been forgotten,” Meyers says.
“William and Mary is the first college or university in America to concern itself with educating blacks.”
Despite that landmark affiliation, neither Hunter nor Dawson were questioning the culture of slavery when they hired schoolmistress Anne Wager to begin teaching.
Nor did the members of Williamsburg gentry — such as John Blair and Peyton Randolph — or its many tavernkeepers — such as Christiana Campbell and Jane Vogel — who routinely sent their young black boys and girls to the school.
Saving their souls was important, Richter says. But so were the lessons in reading, writing, needlework and manners that made them more useful and valuable as servants.
Still, the same training that left some blacks better educated than most white colonists had consequences the school’s founders didn’t intend..
Numerous newspaper ads describe runaways who could read and write, and who declared they had the right to be free. And some students may have played roles in the secret congregation of slaves and free blacks that founded America’s first African-American church.
“It shows you that what happened at the Bray School stuck,” Richter says.