PHOTO: MIKE WANLESS
Gloucester Street was paved in concrete. It would take many years to reverse the damage that “progress” had done to the village, but one man’s unyielding passion for Williamsburg would eventually restore the town to its colonial state.
The successful restoration of Colonial Williamsburg was the result of the work of the Reverend Dr. William Goodwin, whose drive to restore and preserve the town began in 1903, when he was offered the position of rector of the historic Bruton Parish Church. Goodwin was keenly aware of the historical significance of the church. Four presidents of the United States, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Tyler, had pews marked with their names there, and Goodwin accepted the job as rector only with the understanding that the interior of the church would be restored to its eighteenth-century appearance. The successful restoration of Bruton Parish Church gave Goodwin the confidence to believe Williamsburg itself could also be restored; however, in 1908, Goodwin’s work was inter- rupted for fifteen years when he left Williamsburg for a pastorate in Rochester, New York. When he returned to the town in 1923 to head the Department of Biblical Literature and Religious Education at the College of William and Mary, he was disap- pointed to see that with the rise of the automobile, Williamsburg had turned into, as he put it, “just another town, a highway town lining a busy strip of concrete. . . .” Goodwin felt that the city was rapidly losing its soul, but he was determined to save it.
Finding a Benefactor Goodwin once noted that “no man has yet had the vision and courage to preserve a colonial village, and Williamsburg is the one remaining colonial village any man could buy.” But even if any man could buy it, not every man had the resources to do so. Goodwin needed to find a benefactor for his scheme, and his first well- intentioned, if poorly thought-out, plan was to approach the Henry Ford family for funding.
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u Constructed in 1715, Bruton Parish Church was an important part of the Christmas day rituals of Williamsburg’s colonial residents. Today, its remodeled interior appears much as it would have during the eighteenth century.
u In 1926, the Reverend Dr. William Goodwin (left) and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (right) teamed up to begin a restoration of Colonial Williamsburg.
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1
PHOTO: COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VA
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