Oldest Colonial Building Found in Williamsburg

It makes sense that during the construction of the new archaeological center, the foundation of a 17th-century house that predates Williamsburg was excavated in Williamsburg, Virginia. If preliminary dating is correct, this is the oldest colonial building in Colonial Williamsburg.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the new Campbell Archaeology Center took place on April 21, 2023, and archaeological excavations have begun on the site ahead of construction. The site has been a parking lot since a hospital was built there in the 1960s, but beneath the asphalt lies an unexpected treasure: a 32-by-24-foot brick foundation, cellar, and a well 40 feet away. Preliminary dating suggests the house was built in the late 1600s, when Williamsburg was still known as Middle Plantation. (It was renamed and became the colony’s capital in 1699.) The building was demolished in the 1620s or 1630s.

Artifacts found included fragments of plaster walls, diamond-shaped glass window panes, casement windows, handles of silver teaspoons, wig curlers and imported ceramics, all indicating a wealthy family who could afford to build and decorate their house with the most elaborate and expensive equipment.

Excavation work is still ongoing. Once the excavation is complete, the site will be covered to protect it, but the design of the new archaeological center has been modified to include a glass floor so that visitors can see the foundations of the house as they walk through it.

[Jack Gary, Executive Director of Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg] He estimates that his team of nearly 30 archaeologists will need about two more weeks to excavate the site, but he says that getting artifacts out of the ground only accounts for about 40 percent of the total work. The remaining 60 percent of the work takes place in the lab.

“So these artifacts that we find, and it’s actually going to be thousands of artifacts,” Gary said, “are going to be brought back to our labs where we’re going to clean them, catalog them, start to piece the broken pieces back together to understand what they are. So the study of the site is actually going to continue for weeks, if not months, after the actual excavation is done.”

Everything they find will be made into exhibits at the new archaeological center, and visitors will have the opportunity to see artifacts from the site beneath the new building. The construction team is also exploring ways to allow visitors to see the site itself from a gallery located directly above it.

The new Campbell Center will not only display and store Colonial Williamsburg’s rich archaeological materials, but will also feature laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art equipment that will be open to the public so that the public can observe the research, cleaning, and conservation process of artifacts in real time and interact with archaeologists. There will also be a public teaching laboratory where guests can learn about archaeology and get hands-on experience of professionals at work. The new center is scheduled to open in 2026.