Qualla: Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia)

Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiske Kimball (1888-1955) (author of book; for possible illustrators, see acknowledgements page of book), Public domain. On December 22, 1781, the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg caught fire. The Siege of Yorktown had ended two months earlier with Cornwallis's surrender, and the elegant building Royal Governors had once used to project the power of the British Crown was filled with wounded American soldiers, a makeshift hospital. By the time the fire finished, the main house was gone. The brick outbuildings stood for decades more, but Union and Confederate soldiers carried off the bricks during the Civil War to build other things. By the early 20th century, almost nothing of the Palace remained above ground. The building you can walk through today on the north end of Palace Green is a reconstruction, completed in the early 1930s, built on the original foundations using Jefferson's surviving drawings and a copper engraving rediscovered at Oxford.

Image: Fiske Kimball (1888-1955) (author of book; for possible illustrators, see acknowledgements page of book) | Public domain

Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia): A Palace for an Absentee Governor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0. Construction began in 1706. The Royal Governor of Virginia in the years that followed was a paper figure: George Hamilton, 1st Earl of Orkney, who collected the salary from London and is not known to have ever crossed the Atlantic. The man who actually lived in the half-finished ...

Image: Ron Cogswell | CC BY 2.0

Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia): From Crown to Commonwealth

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Calips assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of the 18th century the Palace served seven Royal Governors. Then the Revolution turned it into something stranger: the residence of the new Commonwealth of Virginia's first two governors. Patrick Henry, who had attacked the Stamp Act from the floor of the nearby Capitol...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Calips assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia): Fire, Salvage, and Erasure

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0. The Palace did not survive the year after Yorktown. In the fall of 1781, with Continental and French armies still treating wounds from the long siege, the building was pressed into service as a hospital. On December 22, fire took the main house. The cause is not certainly known; ...

Image: Ron Cogswell | CC BY 2.0

Governor's Palace (Williamsburg, Virginia): Rebuilt from Fragments

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. The reconstruction came through W.A.R. Goodwin, the Bruton Parish rector who had also pulled the Capitol and Wren Building out of ruin with John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s money. The architects had more to work with than they might have expected. Excavations exposed the original founda...

Image: Jonathunder | Public domain