Colonial Williamsburg Guide

Colonial Williamsburg is the largest living-history museum in the country — a 301-acre restoration of Virginia’s 18th-century capital, where costumed interpreters run the printshop, the blacksmith’s forge, the tavern, and the Capitol as they were on the eve of the Revolution. Rockefeller money rebuilt it in the 1920s and ’30s, and for decades it told a tidy, powdered-wig story. It tells a fuller one now: more than half of 18th-century Williamsburg was Black, most of them enslaved, and their lives — the labor the whole town ran on — are finally interpreted here honestly, not edited out. It’s the anchor of the Historic Triangle, linked by the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown and Yorktown.