Crews unearth relics of enslaved children’s lives at site of 1760s school

A William & Mary archaeologist works to expose a chimney base beneath Robert M. Gates Hall — believed to be part of the original 18th-century foundation of the Williamsburg Bray School in Virginia. Photo / William & Mary Archaeological Research Center, Washington Post

Archaeologist Tom Higgins calls it one of the most unique projects he’s worked on in 40 years.

Underneath William & Mary’s Gates Hall, which is undergoing renovation, archaeologists are donning hard hats, steel-toed boots and safety glasses to find what has long been hidden in its foundation: the remnants of the Williamsburg Bray School, which educated enslaved and freed black children in the 1760s.

They’ve already discovered the near-complete foundation of the school – one of the oldest surviving buildings in the country where black children were taught before the American Revolution – and signs of the daily life that occurred above it. And on Thursday, a museum about the Bray School opened to the public in Colonial Williamsburg.

Higgins, who is supervising the fieldwork, said crews have excavated a chimney base, a cellar and hundreds of artefacts that could prove illuminating: pieces of slate pencils possibly dating back 250 years, a wig curler, jewellery, a pottery fragment known as a colonoware sherd that is typical of ceramics made by enslaved Africans during the 1700s.

They also found brooches and ceramics, probably dating from when the building served as a dorm for female students during the early days of co-education at William & Mary.

“We’re finding such an amazing range from the 18th century to the 20th century,” Higgins said. “It’s thrilling.”

While fragments of the building’s foundation had been previously found, historians hope the unearthing of the larger foundation and related artefacts will broaden and deepen the nation’s understanding of its formative years and the experiences of the people who lived through them. The discoveries come after some states have restricted what history can be taught and as the country continues to debate how to remember its past.

The Williamsburg Bray School, one of many founded by an England-based Anglican charity to bring religion to enslaved people, educated hundreds of mostly enslaved black 3-to-10-year-olds at a time when that was rare, seeking to convince the students that their circumstances were ordained by God, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s website. Some free black children also attended the school.

After the Bray School closed, the building was expanded and largely forgotten, sheltering families and students. Virginia later banned education for enslaved people, worried about the power that knowledge could give.

In the 1920s, the original Bray School building housed Methodist women attending William & Mary before it was moved down Prince George St.

William & Mary archaeologists and workers excavate the interior at the original site of the Bray School. Photo / William & Mary Archaeological Research Center, Washington Post

In 2020, researchers discovered the schoolhouse structure and, in 2023, moved it to Colonial Williamsburg.

As the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation restored the schoolhouse – promising to one day open it to the public as a museum – historians continued to gain insight into the children. They learned that the students went to school seven days a week and, on Sundays, gathered there to go to church, according to the foundation.

Last year, Colonial Williamsburg, William & Mary and descendants of Bray School students dedicated the restored school. On Thursday, it officially opened as a museum.

Tom Higgins, project archaeologist at the William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research, points out soil elevations discovered in the 18th-century cellar at the original Williamsburg Bray School site. Photo / Grace Helmick/William & Mary, Washington Post

The latest excavation effort into the school’s foundation began with a $30 million anonymous gift to transform a vacant Brown Hall – the name of the dorm that was eventually built on top of the Bray School’s foundation – into Robert M. Gates Hall, named after the former defence secretary and current William & Mary chancellor. The renovation will make Gates Hall a hub for research and teaching across subjects, home to the university’s Global Research Institute, the Institute for Integrative Conservation and the Whole of Government Centre of Excellence, according to the school.

In May, William & Mary president Katherine A. Rowe called Elizabeth J. Monroe, the co-director of the university’s Centre for Archeological Research, to propose assembling a team to excavate the building’s foundation while construction workers conducted the renovation, Monroe said in an interview. Two weeks later, archaeologists began work.

The team soon found the previously undocumented cellar. It was large, at 9m x 5m, with two distinct levels. And it appeared to be from the early days of the building.

In addition to the pencils and wig curler, archaeologists found buttons of a variety of materials, brooches, white clay pipes and ceramics that could have been used by the women who lived in Brown Hall. They also found a piece of glass likely from the 20th century depicting Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, justice, war and the arts.

“We know that the girls at Brown Hall were furnishing their dorms,” said Michele L. Brumfield, senior researcher at the school’s archaeology centre. “So maybe they were bringing in things like this.”

Monroe, the co-director, said some of those items could have “easily fallen between the cracks of the floorboard and been there ever since”.

Still, it’s early days for the archaeologists and researchers tasked with figuring out what the artefacts they’ve found actually say about daily life in the school and dorm.

The excavation is scheduled to end in the coming week, but the analysis will take longer. In the meantime, the university plans to incorporate the discoveries into an exhibit in Gates Hall, hoping to outline the foundation of the original Bray School on the floor of the hall.

“We are not done understanding the history of the Williamsburg Bray School, the history of Black education,” Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the W&M Bray School Lab, said in a statement. “We are not done learning the history of this area, and we are certainly not done learning the history of this country.”