Why Nobody Wants to Visit Colonial Williamsburg

In 1926, a Virginia minister named W.A.R. Goodwin convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. to do something nobody had ever attempted — restore an entire American city to the way it looked before the Revolution. Over the next three decades, the Rockefeller family spent what amounts to more than a billion dollars in today's money rebuilding Colonial Williamsburg, demolishing over seven hundred buildings, reconstructing the colonial capital of Virginia brick by brick, and turning Duke of Gloucester Street into the most ambitious living history museum in the country. By the 1970s, more than a million visitors a year walked those streets. School buses lined up for blocks. The Williamsburg Inn was booked months out. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation controlled an endowment worth hundreds of millions. Then the audience disappeared. This is the story of how Colonial Williamsburg was built, what it cost, who paid for it, and why — despite all that money, all that history, and all that effort — America quietly stopped showing up. Sources: Anders Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg: The Restoration of Virginia's Eighteenth-Century Capital (University Press of Florida, 2009) Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926–1949 (University Press of Virginia, 1981) Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY — Rockefeller family papers and Colonial Williamsburg correspondence Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, annual reports and institutional records W.A.R. Goodwin Papers, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Michael Alison Chandler, "Colonial Williamsburg Struggles to Remain Relevant and Solvent," The Washington Post, 2017