Colonial Williamsburg beckons as a living history experience
“This is your last chance to confess,” the young woman in a frilled white bonnet snarls. This evening my daughter Maxine and I have been winnowed into a small room in the back of the gaol, the jail, along with a few other hapless souls to sift through clues in an effort to escape. It isn’t long before another mother-daughter duo confesses to being spies for the British. Maxine falls next, but I, along with a pair of history teachers, hold firm. It turns out our interrogator is a double agent and Maxine and her cohorts are led away as prisoners. My side is feted as valuable assets to the cause of the American Revolution. All of us are part of the most creative of escape rooms, this one called Escape The King found only at Colonial Williamsburg.
There are many “only at Colonial Williamsburg” experiences at this living history site, just as John D. Rockefeller and fellow-minded history buffs intended when they teamed up to save this fading town, restoring the buildings and bringing context to the streetscape. Nearly 100 years later, generations of families pilgrimage to the site, as I did recently with my 12-year-old daughter.
Here on the 301-acre site, life goes on very much as it did when it was the colonial capital during the heady days of the brewing American Revolution. Masons fire bricks, coopers craft storage barrels and blacksmiths sculpt horseshoes. Artisans, who never break historical character, make shoes, hats and wigs and throw open their doors to take questions. Maxine and I linger at the milliner’s shop, enthralled with her story of how she gained financial independence in a society that generally denied women such opportunities. In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg has made a concerted effort to address complicated social issues, including the role of women and slaves in the city.
One of the best places to explore inequities in colonial America is at the courthouse, where mock trails illustrate the feckless churnings of early justice with verdicts often based more upon bigotry and personal vendettas rather than actual criminal activity. Any family that has visited Colonial Williamsburg likely has a photo of kids grinning with their necks and arms dangling from the stockades that sit beside the courthouse. In reality, the stocks were the most painful and humiliating of punishments. It’s doubtful that convicts cracked a smile since they were often left painfully shackled overnight and endured fellow citizens spewing taunts at them.
Today, Colonial Williamsburg is an energetic place, largely because it abuts the town of Williamsburg, home to the College of William and Mary. You’re as apt to bump into a regiment of British militia as you are a college student on an afternoon jog. This means you weave seamlessly from colonial to modern days. You can, and should, pause at one of the atmospheric historic taverns to dine amid candlelight, creaky floorboards and traveling minstrels. But, you can also sample the best of the region’s modern Southern cuisine steps from the clip-clop of horses strutting the cobblestones. One night Maxine and I commandeer a plush velvet demi lune sofa at the Rockefeller Room for a taste of oysters twirled with sabayon sauce and crab cakes topping a crisp cucumber remoulade.
The restaurant happens to be tucked within the gracious Williamsburg Inn, the jewel of Colonial Williamsburg and where Maxine and I hole up for the night. We sink into a spacious room swathed in silk that delivers perfect Wi-Fi, knowing all too well that even the wealthiest colonists never could image such luxury. Ditto at the spa, a quiet oasis with steam rooms and a whirlpool, where we retreat for massages. While the facility is very 21stcentury, therapists offer a nod to the past by tapping local herbs and roots for treatments.
The next morning we borrow bikes from the hotel so we can explore Colonial Williamsburg in the quiet early morning hours. We pass a cluster of bonneted women swinging baskets and then pause for a long while before a huddle of nervous lambs pressed against a split rail fence.
Colonial Williamsburg gives you a chance to slow your pace and learn about history and each other. Since our escape room adventure, Maxine has given her position as a loyalist more thought. She’s come to conclusion that the colonists owed a great debt of gratitude — and, yes, heavy taxes— to England. I don’t agree, but I don’t have to. The beauty of the experience was that we spent the next couple of days talking it over. This isn’t a conversation that would have sprung to life on any other vacation, not in Cabo nor Crete. It could only happen here. Chalk it up to another “only in Colonial Williamsburg.”