Nobody has ever read all of these
For almost 100 years, Colonial Williamsburg has been researching its own town.
The result is more than 900 research reports. Over 33,000 pages. Deed books. Diaries. Old newspapers. Somebody's shop accounts.
So we used AI and machine reading to go through all of it, and pulled out every footnote along the way.
Then we asked one question: what was this town rebuilt from?
Two pillars
Rebuilding a whole 1700s town takes proof. So what did the researchers reach for?
Two things, over and over.
A newspaper — the Virginia Gazette. It turns up in about half of all the reports. And a courthouse — York County's records. About four out of ten.
One weekly paper. One county's paperwork. Everything else trails far behind.
Read about the Gazettes →One newspaper, five printers
"The Virginia Gazette" sounds like one newspaper. It wasn't.
Different printers ran it at different times. Sometimes two ran at once, going head to head for readers.
William Hunter
William Rind
Dixon & Nicolson
John Pinkney
By 1775 it mattered a lot. Three rival Gazettes were publishing in Williamsburg at the same time. They did not agree with each other.
Read about the Gazettes →The deed books
The most-used source in all these reports is not an exciting one. It's the York County deed books.
Here's why. Every house has a paper trail. Sold. Mortgaged. Left in a will. Split between children. Each step leaves a document behind.
Researchers followed those trails house by house across the whole town.
It turns out paperwork is how you rebuild a city.
Browse York County records →Somebody's shop accounts
Deeds tell you who owned a house. Account books tell you what happened inside it.
Humphrey Harwood was a Williamsburg bricklayer. He wrote down every job. A chimney repaired here. A wall whitewashed there. Who paid, and how much.
Researchers used these books constantly — and leaned on them more and more as the years went by.
A tradesman's receipts turned into a set of instructions.
The Frenchman's map
In 1782, a French army officer drew a map of Williamsburg. He sketched every building he could see — house after house, shed after shed, as neat little rectangles.
He probably did it to work out where soldiers could sleep.
It became one of the most useful documents in the entire restoration. When researchers needed to know if a building existed, and exactly where it stood, they checked his map.
Nobody knows his name.
The plate in the library
In 1929, in a library in Oxford, England, someone pulled out an old copper printing plate.
Cut into the metal were pictures of Williamsburg buildings. The Capitol. The Wren Building. The Governor's Palace. Some had burned down or fallen apart long before anyone alive had seen them.
Nobody in Virginia knew the pictures existed.
It surfaced right when the restoration needed it most.
A young man's diary
In 1773, a young man named Philip Fithian came to Virginia to teach a planter's children. He kept a diary.
He wrote about dancing lessons. Thunderstorms. What was for dinner. Who was rude at the table. The way people talked.
He wasn't trying to be useful to anybody.
Two hundred years later, Williamsburg's researchers reached for his diary again and again.
Keep a journal. Someone may need it.
Read about travel journals →The visitors
Travellers write letters home. Lucky for us.
An English clergyman, Andrew Burnaby
A German doctor, Johann Schoepf
A young Englishman, Nicholas Cresswell
They noticed the things locals never bothered to write down. The mud. The noise. The smell. The food. Whatever struck them as odd.
When you want to know what a street actually felt like, a stranger's complaints beat a property deed every time.
Read about travel journals →The diary keepers
Visitors passed through. People who lived nearby saw more.
John Blair kept a diary in Williamsburg. So did St. George Tucker, a lawyer and judge. Landon Carter, a planter, filled his with weather, arguments, and long complaints about his grown son.
And William Byrd wrote his diary in a secret shorthand. It sat unreadable for about 200 years. When someone finally cracked the code, he had written down nearly everything.
Researchers used all of them.
They asked the people who remembered
By 1928, the restoration was underway — and the people running it noticed something. A few older residents could still remember Williamsburg the way it used to be.
So they asked them to write it down.
John S. Charles did. So did Mrs. Victoria Lee and Mrs. Martha Vandegrift. They described houses already torn down. Where the doors were. What was painted over a fireplace.
Their memories reached back to the 1860s.
The first report was two pages long
In 1931, a researcher named Helen Bullock wrote up the history of a house on Nicholson Street. The whole thing ran about two pages. She sent copies to the architects and to the minister whose idea the restoration had been.
Ten years later, a report on one single house could run twenty pages or more.
What began as a quick note to the builders became a full investigation.
Four women, more than 260 reports
Helen Bullock 74
Mary E. McWilliams 40
Mary Goodwin 21
Together they produced roughly a third of everything in the collection.
They spent decades in deed books and courthouse records, working through the town one house at a time.
You won't find their names on any building here.
One report, 1,716 footnotes
Most of these reports have around 25 footnotes.
One of them has 1,716.
It's a study of what Virginia's Revolutionary War soldiers wore. Where the cloth came from. What the state handed out. Who sewed what. One researcher chased down every scrap of evidence that existed.
Some questions just take longer.
The most-documented year
Line up every document these reports cite and some years are thick with paper. Others are nearly blank.
So which year in Williamsburg's history is documented best?
1776. Then 1775. Then 1777.
Nine of the twelve best-documented years fall in the 1770s.
The Revolution didn't only happen here. It made paperwork here.
See revolutionary documents →One book, over and over
Somewhere in the York County courthouse sits a book of property deeds. Book 6.
It is the single most-used item in a hundred years of Williamsburg research — roughly 174 footnotes point back to it, spread across dozens of separate reports.
Different researchers. Different houses. Different decades. The same book, again and again.
If one object rebuilt this town, it's a volume of paperwork nobody outside a courthouse would look at twice.
Browse York County records →They copied the holes too
When a researcher found a hole in an old document, they wrote down the hole.
[torn]
[illegible]
[blotted]
About four out of every ten of these reports have at least one of those marks in them. More than 2,500 in all.
"2 [blotted] big & 12 small buttons"
Somebody's ink smudged. Two hundred years later, nobody knows the number.
See objects from the collection →Go look for yourself
Every building here started out as a question.
Somebody had to go find the answer — in a deed book, a diary, a bricklayer's accounts, a copper plate in an English library.
Almost a hundred years of that work sits behind the town you can walk through today.
See the sources →