Faced with a shortage of housing, the answer was clear. Prefabricated houses by the hundreds, churned out of factories using standard designs. Workers and their families soon filled them in the heart of a growing commercial hotspot and a new suburb was born. Sure the houses all looked alike, but their occupants had a roof over their heads and soon the house-proud residents in their distinctive architecture were a community. Auckland 2021? Try Hamilton’s Frankton Railway Village 1920. A century on from the beginning of a unique New Zealand architectural style, those who today call Frankton’s railway houses home are staying true to its roots in an age of increasing urban intensification.
William & Mary Military Science/Digges House at 524 Prince George St. (WYDaily/Courtesy of William and Mary)
The unassuming, small, white building tucked away on Prince George Street houses a lot more history than was originally thought.
The building most recently housed offices for William and Mary’s Department of Military Science and is known as the Prince George House on campus.
Dendrochronology analysis of the building’s wood framing conducted in 2020 by Colonial Williamsburg researchers confirmed the structure once housed Williamsburg’s Bray School, an institution that educated many of the town’s Black children from 1760 to 1774.
The Bray School’s mission was to impart Christian education to Black children and for students to accept enslavement as divinely ordained. The school was suggested for establishment in Williamsburg by Benjamin Franklin.
Photo - of - by Joseph McClain | February 25, 2021
A small white building that sits tucked away on the William & Mary campus once held an 18th-century school dedicated to the religious education of enslaved and free Black children, researchers have determined.
Now, the university and its neighbor, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, are working together to ensure future generations learn about the history of the building and the stories of those who were part of it.
William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg have forged a partnership regarding the future use of the building, now known as the Bray-Digges House, likely the oldest extant building in the U.S. dedicated to the education of Black children. The agreement calls for relocation of the structure to Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area, where it would become the 89th original structure restored by the foundation.
Image: Jack Gary
Despite the amount of history that sits atop its soil, plenty of stories remain buried below Colonial Williamsburg. One of those stories is that of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, an early Black church that stood until the 1950s on the historic site, on which excavations began last fall. Now, archaeologists have found human remains on the site; further assurance that the team was digging in the right place, and a step towards being able to connect those interred residents of the past with today’s descendant community.
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Announced in a community meeting this week, the found remains include a human tooth and probable finger bone, alongside a trove of other fragmentary bones that are harder to attribute to any one species. Animal bones were also found on the site, which is currently an approximately 400-square-foot (37-square-meter) area on the west side of Colonial Williamsburg, at the intersection of Francis
Human Remains Unearthed Where Colonial Williamsburg s First Black Church Once Stood gizmodo.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gizmodo.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.