The funny thing about CW is that it’s always there, on the periphery of the College, and yet I don’t think that most of us usually think too much about it. Last year, I lived in Taliaferro Hall, o the very outer limits of campus, and I still only went into it three or four times. Whenever my family came down, we walked down DoG street, catching up. My little sister would gawk at the sheep and beg to go on a horse-drawn carriage. For some reason, I assumed it had always been there. I had no idea that CW, Merchant’s Square, and all of Williamsburg had undergone a “Restoration” in the 1930s until this Branch Out weekend, which I spent researching the social spaces of the Legacy 3 – otherwise known as Janet Brown Strafer, Karen Ely, and Lynn Briley, the first African-American residential students at William & Mary. Unlike the current student population, they spent lots of time in CW, studying on the benches hidden away in the Governor’s palace maze, watching all the tourists (CW was a premier vacation destination back in the day), and seeing the Williamsburg Visitor Center orientation video so many times that they could quote the dialogue (Williamsburg: the Story of a Patriot is actually the longest-running film in history, shown since 1957). Their stories made me think that maybe I should venture further down the street than I usually do, seeking out the quiet places by the reconstructed Governor’s palace or the fields which have been cleared of houses and business apocryphal to the colonial period.
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