The Nation’s Oldest Schoolhouse for Black Children Will Open to the Public Next Year

The oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children in the United States is getting closer to re-opening its doors.

Crews are hard at work restoring the Williamsburg Bray School, which educated hundreds of free and enslaved Black children between 1760 and 1774. So far, they’ve finished restoring and furnishing one room on the first floor, and they’re hard at work on an adjacent room. The building is slated to open to the general public in the spring of 2025.

In the meantime, the historic structure will be formally dedicated on Friday, 250 years after it closed. At the dedication ceremony, descendants will read the names of students who attended the school; Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III is also scheduled to speak. Attendees will then get the chance to tour parts of the building and see how the restoration is progressing.

In 1760, a London-based charity opened the Williamsburg Bray School in Virginia at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin. It was one of several schools opened throughout the colonies to spread Christianity.

A white woman named Ann Wager served as the school’s only teacher for the entire 14 years it operated. During this time, Wager taught roughly 400 students between the ages of 3 and 10. An estimated 90 percent of the children were enslaved.

Using a faith-based curriculum, Wager taught the children to read, write and sew. This type of education was unusual at the time, as enslavers were often worried that literacy would prompt enslaved individuals to read about freedom and rebel, according to the Encyclopedia Virginia.

After shutting down during the American Revolutionary War, the school became a private home. Later, William & Mary bought the building and used it as a university facility.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Colonial Williamsburg (@colonialwmsburg)

About two decades ago, Terry L. Meyers, a literary scholar at William & Mary, started looking into the building’s origins. Other researchers joined the investigation, and after a lot of digging, they confirmed its identity in 2021: The modest white building was once the Williamsburg Bray School. Later that same year, the university agreed to sell the school to Colonial Williamsburg.

In early 2023, crews carefully moved the schoolhouse from its original location on the William & Mary campus to its new permanent home in Colonial Williamsburg. Since then, experts have been restoring the building to its 18th-century appearance.

So far, they’ve removed plaster added to the interior walls during the 20th century, as well as floors installed in the 1930s, according to the Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga. Their work has revealed flooring from 1760, as well as 18th-century tool marks and bark on some of the original planks. They even found original 18-inch roof shingles stuck between pieces of wood.

The chimney is made of original bricks, including one that bears the fingerprints of the laborer who shaped it by hand, per the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Eric Kolenich. Another brick features a print made by a dog’s paw.

Restorers also unearthed pieces of ceramics, silver, love letters, tickets, marbles, pencils and a fragment of a writing slate.

Colonial Williamsburg’s historic tradespeople—including blacksmiths, brickmakers, bookbinders, joiners, weavers and cabinetmakers—are creating replicas of items that would have furnished the school. Using 18th-century techniques, they’re making desks, chairs, books, door hinges, curtains, bedding and more.

Once it opens to the public, the school will serve as a powerful link to the past.

“You’re walking on the floors they walked on in 1760,” Matt Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of architectural preservation, tells the Virginia Gazette’s Kim O’Brien Root. “When you touch the bottom post on the stairs, the wear, the rounded edges, that’s years of bumping and touching. Those types of things are all over the buildings.”

Meanwhile, oral historians and genealogists are also working to identify the hundreds of children who attended the school. So far, they’ve come up with more than 80 names.

“The opening of the building is deeply significant, but the work does not stop when the building opens,” Nicole Brown, an American studies scholar at William & Mary who portrays Wager for Colonial Williamsburg, tells the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Sarah Kuta | READ MORE

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.