How a historian discovered the Bray School
Retired W&M professor’s research led him to the building
Retired William & Mary professor and local historian Terry L. Meyers first discovered Williamsburg’s Bray School for Black children nearly two decades ago.
As Meyers watched the school building move to its new location Friday within Colonial Williamsburg’s historic area, he pondered all that has transpired since his research uncovered the school’s probable site around 2002.
“It’s incredible to see how this has unfolded,” Meyers said. “I had no idea it would take the turn it did.”
The project went from research to a restoration of the 18th-century structure and an effort by William & Mary and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to tell the school’s history and make it available to the public.
The Bray School was one of several established in the colonies by the friends of Dr. Thomas Bray, an 18th-century philanthropist. It was run in Williamsburg from 1760-74 and was probably the largest and lasted the longest.
Meyers’ discovery of the school building didn’t happen by chance.
Meyers said his “real professorial interest” was in 19th-century English romantic poetry.
“When I came to Williamsburg, I found that the 19th century had been erased,” he said. “Things went from the 18th century directly into the 20th century. Therefore, I kept my eye out for 19th-century Williamsburg in books and publications.
“Ed Belvin, who I think came to town in the early 1920s before the Williamsburg Restoration, wrote books” on the old town that he knew as a youth.
In one volume, “Williamsburg Facts and Fiction,” Meyers explained, “I came across a reference to a Brown Hall … on the corner of Boundary and Prince George streets before 1930. The building was thought to be the home of Dudley Digges, the Yorktown patriot.”
Ultimately, it was determined that the home was for Dudley Digges, of Williamsburg, the patriot’s uncle.
Belvin wrote that the house had been bought by the college and “moved across the street,” where it was still used by the college.
“I turned to Louise (Lambert) Kale, the director of William & Mary’s historic campus, to see if she knew anything about an 18th-century house on campus,” said Meyers, who was an English professor.
“She looked at many references, and we didn’t find any. And then we walked about campus looking at various buildings.
“Louise wondered if the military science building at 524 Prince George St. could be the Digges House, but it didn’t look colonial.”
Meyers then went to Colonial Williamsburg’s Rockefeller Library and found “a treasure trove.
“There were photos of the old house, and it was the one Louise and I were looking at.”
There had been additions to the home, and chimneys were situated in the interior. But if the additions were removed and the roof altered, a Colonial building would appear with chimneys on the end, Meyers said.
“About the same time I learned that the structure may have been, in some way, associated with education,” said Meyers, who located correspondence between Robert Carter Nicholas, a member of the House of Burgesses, and associates of Bray in London circa 1758-59.
Additional research revealed Digges had been paid eight pounds per year for the rental of the house for “a charity school” to “instruct Negro children in Williamsburg in the doctrines of the Episcopal Church and to teach them to spell, read and write.”
Later, Meyers discovered William & Mary had sent two of its own enslaved children to the school.
“It was a kind of electric moment to know that I worked at an institution that enslaved people, including students,” he said.
Meyers’ research put together a building, a school and students.