WILLIAMSBURG — For more than a year, the Bray School has stood on the edge of a Colonial Williamsburg parking lot, encased in protective wrapping.
This past week, as the day for opening the historic building to the public draws closer, the wrapping and its scaffolding came down, revealing the work complete so far.
The building once housed one of the first Black schools in the United States, and it is the only known one still standing. The building has survived centuries of use, renovations and enlargements and a move from its original site in 1930. It was even lost for a while, until a retired William & Mary professor’s research identified a non-descript building on the W&M campus in the early 2000s.
Since being moved near the original site of the Historic First Baptist Church, work has been going on to restore the building so that it can serve as a place to visit and learn a more complete story about 18th-century America. The plan is to have the Bray School open to visitors by Nov. 1, with the outside and a schoolroom completed.
The school, established in 1760 by an 18th-century English philanthropist, was intended to give Black children a “Christian education” — which included reading and possibly writing, but also encouraged them to accept slavery as part of God’s plan. William & Mary and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation are working together to uncover and preserve the school’s history, which includes finding its descendants.
On Friday, the Bray School project was announced as the recipient of the Louis J. Malon Outstanding Preservation Achievement Award given by Preservation Virginia, a nonprofit group that supports historic preservation across the state.
With the scaffolding down, visitors will be able to more easily see “the project in progress, kind of a behind-the-scenes look at what we do, and why we do it,” said Matt Webster, executive director of Architectural Preservation at Colonial Williamsburg.
Webster’s team is leading the project with assistance from members of the Historic Trades department and the modern Building Trades department. There are many different skill sets being put to work on the biggest restoration project Colonial Williamsburg has undertaken in a long time, CW Foundation spokeswoman Ellen Peltz said.
“It’s an all-foundation effort,” Webster said. I don’t think there’s any group that’s not involved.”
Now, the public is able to see the restored exterior for the first time, including a new roof.
The roof of the Bray School had been altered in the 1930s when the building served as a dorm for William & Mary, which actually made the structure look bigger, according to Webster. To stay true to the 18th century, the gambrel roof has been replaced with a gable roof, so the building more resembles what it once looked like. Additions that were added over the years were not moved with the building.
“It looks a lot smaller now, but that’s the way it looked in the 18th century,” Webster said.
In the coming weeks, crews will be finishing off the chimneys, installing a bulkhead entrance and putting in dormer windows and exterior doors. Once the heavier work is completed, attention will turn to the details.
Colonial Williamsburg’s Architectural Preservation and Research Department maintains a Facebook page updating the progress, where people can see photos and learn about the different trades that are involved in the restoration. There, visitors can learn how the Bray School’s masonry work is split among historic trades masons, modern masons and contracted historic preservation masons. Or about how paint samples have been taken and analyzed to see if they might give clues to what existed in the 18th century.
CW’s blacksmith shop has also been involved. Little of the Bray School’s original hardware exists because of later renovations, so several thousand iron nails are needed, wrote apprentice blacksmith Broadus Thompson on the Historic Trades and Skills of Colonial Williamsburg Facebook page. There’s also the need for hinges and locks, which require extra detail, Thompson said.
“Historically, all these items could easily be gotten as imports from England, where they were made more cheaply by droves of specialized workmen, like Nailers, Hinge Makers and Locksmiths,” he wrote. “A Virginian blacksmith should still have been familiar with these forms, as jobs like custom made hinges or repairing locks were commonplace. However, they seldom worked to manufacture these items in quantity, as they charged more for their work than the cost of the English imports.
“Today we do manufacture all those items, as many of them are difficult to obtain from any modern merchant.”
On any given day, there are a dozen people or more at work on the Bray School, which already has been attracting more attention by visitors.
“These are exciting steps,” Webster said. “It’s been a long time since Colonial Williamsburg’s done a project like this.”
For more about the efforts of William & Mary’s Bray School Lab, visit wm.edu/sites/brayschool.
Kim O’Brien Root, kimberly.root@virginiamedia.com
