About

We invite interested members of the public to take a one-hour walking tour of William & Mary's revolutionary history, led by current undergraduate students. There are spots to sit and talk along the way!

In the era of the revolution, Wililam & Mary was utterly and permanently transformed.

Its divinity school and the Brafferton Indian school, the primary causes of its charter, closed.

Its pre-revolutionary faculty, by and large, fled or were removed.

It was host and witness to events with impacts well beyond its boundaries or control, including a military training site at the "College Camp" and the Fourth Virginia Convention, December 1775-January 1776.

Many of the longest-standing residents of the college--people enslaved here--had been hired out or sold by the end of the revolution, along with large tracts of college plantation land.

And the college's core programs of study--its existential character--changed to meet the republican moment and financial needs, as well.

The college's stories give life and substance to the era of the revolution. They connect the campus to the city and state and to battlefields up and down the seaboard, and help us to fathom what this time cost, and offered, to those who lived it. And the histories give us ways to talk about what the revolution might mean to us now at the 250th, inasmuch as they raise questions about the meaning of freedom of religion and assembly, about the need of republicanism for higher education, and the ties of allies in wartime.

Students guides are members of Dr. Robyn Schroeder's course, HIST 312: The Revolution at William & Mary, which is sponsored by the National Institute of American History & Democracy (NIAHD), a unit of William & Mary's History department that does place-based history, public history, and material culture studies. The course is run in part to update public understandings of the campus's history in the revolution, as they have evolved with new research.

William & Mary is a public research university. The tour is free and runs Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in April. Everyone is welcome.