Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library

THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE.
March 8, 1934.

The span of life of the Governor's Palace at Williamsburg was seventy-six years, from 1705 to 1781, but in this time it saw the pageant of Virginia colonial life at its best. Its burning down in December of 1781, after the Virginia government had moved to Richmond, and when it was being used as a hospital for the wounded of General Washington's Army at Yorktown, was symbolic of its intimate and dramatic connection with the Revolution that brought a new nation into being. The two smaller buildings that flanked its forecourt survived the fire and remained in use as private residences until the Union Army tore them down about 1863.

The history of the Palace is as follows. For many years before the capital of the Colony was removed from Jamestown to Williamsburg there had been instructions to each incoming Governor directing the building of a Governor's House. It was not however until this move to Williamsburg had actually taken place and until Governor Nott's administration, in the Session of October 1705, that the General Assembly finally passed an Act making an appropriation of £ 3000, giving specifications, and appointing an overseer for the building of the house. After Nott's death, during the period from 1706 to 1710, President Edmund Jenings supervised the work for which Henry Cary was overseer.

In 1710 Alexander Spotswood came as Governor, and finding the work at a standstill, caused the passage of two Acts, one in 1710, and another in 1713, for finishing the Governor's House. It was during the years of 2 his administration, from 1710 to 1722, that the Palace was finished and ornamented with its gardens, canals, and other improvements. So great a sum of money was spent that in 1718 a complaint was sent to the King, remonstrating against the "lavishing away" of the country's money.

Succeeding Governors made improvements, and accounts for repairs were paid by the Council from the "two shillings revenue". In 1749, after the departure of Gooch, the Council viewed the building, and decided that extensive repairs were necessary before the arrival of another Governor.

While these repairs were going on, along with the adding of the Ball Room Wing and the other extensive remodelling which probably took place at this time, the Palace had to be vacated and a temporary residence for Governor Dinwiddie was provided when he arrived in 1751 by the purchase of the neighboring house which is still standing and is known as the Carter-Saunders House. These alterations and repairs, which were undoubtedly extensive enough to change the character of the interior of the Palace, were in charge of Richard Taliaferro.

From this time on the records show fewer and fewer accounts for repairs. With a few exceptions, from Fauquier's administration until the Revolution, no great sums were spent on the Palace. In 1781 the Palace is described as showing signs of grandeur, but is also described as being in a ruinous condition.

It is interesting to estimate the amount of money appropriated by the Assembly for building and finishing the house, and the amounts paid by the Council for repairs. From the purchase of land in 1701, until the Revolutionary War, the Assembly made appropriations for building and furnishing the Palace. Using five dollars to a pound as a rate of exchange, and placing the comparative buying power of money of that time and at the present day at a ratio of 3 one to five, an idea can be obtained of the total amount spent on the building and its repairs from the following; appropriations for construction from 1705 to 1776, £ 7679:11:6, appropriations for repairs from 1722 to 1776, £ 7604:16:6, and therefore a total expenditure on the Palace of £ 15284:8:0, or $382,100.00 in purchasing power today. In addition, sums from the Governor's private purse and additional sums from the revenue of 2 s. per hhd. tax were expended, although records of these sums are not available at the present time.

There is every reason to believe that the Palace with its adjoining offices, gardens, court-yards, park and fish ponds, must have compared more than favorably with other notable seats in the colonies. Travelers, even the most critical, consistently referred to the building as "neat and commodious"—which was high praise at that day— and as "the best on the continent", etc., and referred to the grounds as wonderfully well laid out and well kept.

As to the state owned furniture and furnishings—considered as the "standing furniture" of the Palace—it would seem that as early as 1710, the Committee in charge ordered the best to be placed in the home of their Governor, and in addition there is the evidence of the inventories of the privately owned furniture of Fauquier, Botetourt and Dunmore, to prove the elaborateness of the Palace equipment and the lavishness of the life that went on within its walls. In the inventories of the later Governors some articles of furniture left over from the regimes of the preceding Governors are mentioned so that the Palace furniture must have ranged in character from the "newest fashion" of Botetourt and Dunmore to some items referred to by its appraisers as "old fashioned".

4

The yearly "Birth-Night celebrations", with their accompanying balls and "illuminations", presented an appearance, according to Hugh Jones, equalled and surpassed only by the Court of England.

Fortunately, when it came to the problem of the rebuilding of the Palace by the Restoration, there was a great deal of information available for its accurate reconstruction by the architects.

This consisted of a print of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which showed its approach facade as it was about 1732 to 1747, a plan drawn by Jefferson in 1779, the so-called Frenchman's Map of 1781, and other maps, extensive inventories which not only list the private furniture but give an idea of what the various rooms were like, frequent references to it in the Journals of the House of Burgesses and other Colony records, and the actual foundation walls of both the main buildings and the numerous dependencies, which taken all together afforded ample evidence to go on. In cases where this sort of information was lacking, colonial Virginia architectural motives of the same period were used as a guide.

Much the same situation exists in the matter of the landscape design, and the same sort of careful documentary and archaeological research was involved in the reconstruction of what must have been the most noteworthy garden of this period of 18th century America.

Fortunately the Palace Green, which forms the southerly approach to the Palace and which obviously affected the design of the Palace itself, has never changed in character since it was first laid out at the beginning of the 18th century. The canal or Governor's Fish Pond and the terraces that go down to it from the Palace gardens also left such evidence of their original form as ensured an accurate rebuilding.

5

Excavations revealed the remains of the brick steps which had descended these terraces on the cross axis of the garden to the north of the Palace and the foundations of many of the walls that surrounded the Palace gardens themselves which had fortunately survived—together with steps, paths, foundations of outbuildings, drains and paved areas—as invaluable guides to an accurate resonstruction, In addition to all this there were specifically the traces of the garden layout as shown on the Frenchman's Map—mentioned above—and the indications in the Bodleian print of the patterns of design of both the forecourt and the large garden to the north, which was enclosed in walls and ended in a clair-voyer and a vista.

Great care has been exercised in using colonial Virginia garden precedents in all places where there was no evidence left of what existed here originally, and wherever this has been lacking an English precedent of the same period has been employed on the strength of the close analogy between English and Virginia garden design during this period.

The area near the canal has been planted with varities of trees and shrubs—many of them native—used in the colonial period in Virginia such as live oak, weeping willow, sycamore, Loblolly pine, Liquidambar, Judas tree, paper mulberry, the so-called mimosa, native magnolias, flowering dogwood, wild apple, holly and a number of native ground-covering plants.

In the various divisions of the Palace gardens themselves native red cedar, box and crepe myrtle have been used extensively and roses will be planted in the beds with azaleas and other flowering plants of an early period. Fruit trees and native vines, including wisteria, will be trained on the garden walls, and throughout the rest of the garden the flowering shrubbery and herbasceous plants are those that were used in the colonial period.

6

The northwest section of this general garden area between the western garden wall and the terraces and north of the east and west garden axis was found on excavation to have been used as a cemetery for the one-hundred-and-fifty-eight Revolutionary soldiers who died in the Palace when it was used as a hospital. Their remains rest there undisturbed beneath a simple lawn in the center of which a weeping willow tree has been planted.

There are only two things more to note about the Palace; one is that it was the precursor of the great Virginia houses of the first half of the eighteenth century and therefore might have had some effect on their design, and the other is that it was not only a Governor's Palace but also the headquarters of a great plantation and as such the focal point for all the industries and activities that went to make up those self-sustaining economic plantation-units which were so typical—and so productive of what was the best—of colonial Virginia.