The Governor's Palace at 75

Lloyd Dobyns: Hi. Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg: Past & Present on history.org. This is “Behind the Scenes.” I’m Lloyd Dobyns and mostly I ask questions.

The Governor's Palace is a Williamsburg icon, and this year marks the 75th anniversary of its reconstruction. Here with me now is Chief Curator Emeritus Graham Hood, who had a hand in imagining the most accurate period rooms possible.

Graham Hood: I came to Colonial Williamsburg when the Governor’s Palace was about 50 years old – in its current reincarnation, that is. Which, incidentally, as my wife pointed out one day, is about the same age as it was when Thomas Jefferson first saw it – the original one. That was a nice thing to think about.

The Palace had been enormously popular with the museum-going American public, for almost 50 years. So it was an icon, it was the Holy Grail. It was something that one approached with a great deal of caution. Among my responsibilities was supervision of the period rooms in the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg. There were something like 200 of them. There were a lot of pieces of furniture and furnishing in them, many of which had to be moved from time to time for a whole host of good reasons.

When I came here I inherited a fairly young staff of like-minded, like-thinking people, and they, as I was, were tuned in to some of the most recent developments in the study of period rooms, both in England and in this country. Looking at period rooms from a fresh historical perspective, basically.

So we realized that what we were responsible for in the Historic Area, much of it reflected outdated museum practices. That, of course, was perfectly natural for it to be that way, because I was only the third curator of Colonial Williamsburg. My predecessor had been here for a long time, and his predecessor before that.

So we got to changing some rooms. The Raleigh Tavern was the first one, and those were well-received, and then various other buildings. Along the way, I got to studying the one single, complete inventory of the contents of the Governor’s Palace, which was compiled in the fall of 1770. That inventory had been known about in modern times for over 100 years. A draft of it had been in Richmond since the end of the 18th century in the archives in Richmond.

So it was a thoroughly well-known document, but I looked at and started to read it, and read it hundreds of times with fresh eyes. I wasn’t doing anything that somebody else who was quirky enough to be really interested in this field would have done. But it was clear to me that not only did the interiors of the Governor’s Palace look as if they were out of date, in our field, to the newcomers in our field, but when you looked at the evidence, it was clear that the evidence could show that they were out of date: that they were incorrect, and so on.

Even so, it was something that we felt very careful about. It was, in many ways, the Governor’s Palace is like the Taj Mahal for people who are interested in American interiors, American decorative arts, American history, the history of taste in America, interior design in America – all of these things had sort of combined in a wonderful apogee in the Governor’s Palace in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Well, how do you address that? Do you do it little by little, which I guess is what we did. And then you start to try and produce evidence, concrete historical evidence -- not opinions, not a question of personal taste, it was a question of evidence. Fortunately we lived, we worked in a place like Williamsburg, where evidence had always been accorded a very high rank.

What I had to do then was to lay out the project on a room-by-room, and within each room, item-by-item basis. So that I could say, “This is what is in this particular room, say, this set of chairs is what is in this particular room now. The inventory specifies this kind of set of chairs. They’re not mahogany, which is what we have now, it specifies that they’re walnut. They don’t have lovely damask upholstery, as what we have in there now, it specifies leather.” And so on, and so on.

We were able to get into a degree of specificity because we had so much research already done for us by those who came before us. We were able to get into a degree of specificity that was very convincing to the decision-makers.

Lloyd: Here is an inventory and it says “Twenty dinner plates.” And how do you know what kind of dinner plate, what the design of the dinner plate might be? Where does that come from?

Graham: First of all, you have to say, “What is the date of the inventory? Where is the building that it pertains to? What is the building that it pertains to? Who lived in this building that the inventory pertains to? Who was this person, or who was this family that this inventory pertains to?”

You can say, for example, as the Botetourt inventory is dated October 1770. Ok, well, we know a lot about 1770. But in fact, that pertains to one of the richest men in the colonies. Not only was he a rich man, but he was an Englishman, born in England, that is. He’d only been here two years. He brought a good deal of stuff with him from England.

Not only was he a rich man, but part of his job, for which he was well-paid, was entertaining, entertaining people who were here in Williamsburg, both who lived here and who came here on business. So you need to know all of those background, and that’s just part of the background. You need to know all of that background information.

Then you say, “Where in the building are these plates? Are they in the kitchen, or are they in the storeroom? Are they in a storage closet in the dining room?” Etcetera, etcetera. So, it’s a process of compiling all of that contextual evidence that gradually points you towards some kind of logical conclusion. In other words: context. That’s how you know.

You also need to have somebody who knows what kind of plates are plates, and what kind are otherwise called dishes, or saucers. You need to know what the material is – whether they’re porcelain plates, or stoneware plates and so on and so on. Those are the intrinsic things about the plates, in contrast to the contextual things. But you still need to be able to marry those two to arrive at.

And then of course there’s the archaeology. What did the archaeologists find on this site? Well, the archaeology that was done around the Governor’s Palace was fairly primitive by current standards. They found some things on the site, some things that are in fact appropriate for 1770 period. So maybe they had something like this. But there is the archaeological documentation for it. Does that sort of help pinpoint it?

Lloyd: Yes, it sounds more like you’re a detective than…

Graham: Yes, very much a detective, yes. Historians are detectives. They’re digging into the past, trying to piece things together. How did things go together? That’s what detectives do. Detectives are always following up on something, and never looking ahead to something. They’re trying to recreate something out of bits and pieces of evidence that they have.

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