But Chancellor Professor Emeritus of English Terry Meyers at William & Mary had a hunch: He believed, based on archival material, that a white building housing the school’s Military Science Department was actually the original Bray School building. It had been moved to the William & Mary campus in the 1930s and altered and expanded extensively. Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists excavated the site more than a decade ago, but nothing definitive about its earliest days was concluded.
In early 2020, Webster and his architectural preservation team were called to the building in hopes that they could determine its exact age. “It looked like your basic 1930s or ’40s house,” Webster says. With permission from school administration, they conducted an “invasive investigation,” removing some of the 20th-century siding and plaster to better inspect the building’s original frame. It quickly became clear that this was likely 18th-century construction.
“So then the question became, was it built in 1760? Or 1780?” Webster says. A small difference, he notes, but the difference between knowing if this was the Bray School or not.
Webster called a dendrochronologist—a specialist who could study the growth patterns in the wood of the old framing and identify the “death date” of a tree, or the moment it was felled. Michael Worthington of Baltimore-based Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory took samples of wood from the building, and his findings, Webster says, were shocking: One sample dated to sometime in 1759, two dated to the winter of 1759-60, and one dated to the spring of 1760. Knowing when the trees were felled, and knowing that back then the wood would be formed and sent to construction immediately, they had their answer.
“With this information, we pretty much knew we had the Bray School,” Webster says. “It had been hidden in plain sight.”
Shortly after these findings, Colonial Williamsburg tracked down the school trustee’s full letter, which explained that the Bray School vacated the building because it had outgrown the space. “Thirty children, plus a teacher living there—it wasn’t a matter of its condition, but its size,” Webster says. “The pieces kept falling into place.”
In late 2021, Colonial Williamsburg and William & Mary launched the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative, a joint venture to research and preserve the Bray School, and announced plans to move the building close to its original location on what is now Colonial Williamsburg property.
