Creating Colonial Williamsburg

Image: Colonial Williamsburg composite

Creating Colonial Williamsburg
Anders Greenspan
2002: Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN 1 58834 001 5 (pbk)

It's easy to think of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia as just another theme park. This presentation of eighteenth century American colonial life has to compete with numerous other Disneyesque tourist attractions. There is the usual danger of step-back-in-time-ism (an offence that should lead to a long jail sentence) based on what looks like a costume pageant set in some kind of trans-Atlantic Ruritania. It’s clean, polished, smiling and tranquil. The first time I visited, in the early 70s, I had no idea that it was anything other than an open air museum for which a rather pricey ticket bought a film show followed by a day looking at a series of exhibits. Spending a couple of days there in the summer of 2005, I realised that I could walk from my motel along a street of Williamsburg houses, past some shops, turn left, and along the main street of the historic area – for free. My ticket this time bought me what it did last time: the introductory 1957 film, “The Story of a Patriot”, a short shuttle bus ride, and access to inside many of the buildings which make up the project’s attractiveness. What it encompasses is a part of the straight-forward city of Williamsburg, but one which has been conserved, costumed and largely created to tell the story of America on the eve of independence. Nearby are the Jamestown historic centres, recalling the days and events depicted in Terrence Malik’s 2005 film “The New World”, and Yorktown, which was the site of the British army surrender to the colonists under George Washington.

Colonial Williamsburg is different. It is just part of the city, even if a very differently managed and presented one. This is not what we in Europe might call a city: it feels more like an attractive town of low-rise, low density construction. Open spaces and parkway roads define the landscape as much as do town buildings. The movement to conserve some of the remarkable buildings scattered amongst the main street shops and filling stations of 1920s Williamsburg took time to create what we see today. Anders Greenspan’s book, published under the imprint of the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, tells the story, and how the emphasis changed gradually from rather cosy Americana towards something which looked at, and presented, some of the less comfortable components of Virginian life – the basis in slavery, the hard life of less privileged people and the role of women in the community. It has been a story which needed to tread a careful path between what visitors, often from the north, expected to see, and what residents of the state, born in the values of the south, would allow to be shown. Pride in American independence in the inter-war years was one thing, pride in being a bastion of democracy in the second world war another, but both were easy things to celebrate. Introducing black faces and recalling domestic hardships were much more difficult if visitors didn’t want to be reminded about them. And the Williamsburg project was bound to be expensive, so success depended on those visitors being happy to spend money on tickets, food in the inns of the town, and goods in the shops.

Greenspan’s book – prominently available in Colonial Williamsburg’s excellent bookshop – is often critical, but always fair and detailed. The demands of the physical conservation programme, the visitor interpretation and the background developments which made it possible are thoroughly examined. As a history of a history project it rightly avoids the kind of misleading theorising that sometimes obscures the understanding of complex and changing interpretive schemes. His book brings out the educational basis of the town. Just as school-based education has changed and evolved, so this kind of tourist attraction as grown with the changing values of the community at large. This is a book which must be read by anyone wanting to know better how that has happened.

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