Colonial Williamsburg

Williamsburg was the capital of colonial Virginia, and from the 1920s a restoration funded by Rockefeller money returned around three hundred acres of it to its eighteenth-century state, reconstructing lost buildings and removing later ones. It is the largest living-history site in the country. What lifts it above a collection of old houses is the trades programme: a working blacksmith, a printer setting type and pulling a press, a wigmaker, a cabinetmaker, an apothecary and a foundry, all producing by period methods, much of it used in the restoration itself. Costumed interpreters play specific historical residents, and the programming has expanded considerably to include the enslaved half of the town's population, whose lives are now presented rather than edited out.

What you actually see

• The trade shops - blacksmith, printer, wigmaker and cabinetmaker working by period methods.
• The Governor's Palace - the reconstructed residence and its gardens.
• The Capitol - where the colonial assembly met.
• The interpretation of slavery - programmes on the town's enslaved community.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the most comfortable; Virginia summers are hot and humid in period clothing, which the interpreters endure and you will notice. Christmas is a major season with decorations and events. Weekdays are quieter than weekends and school-trip season.

Honest expectations

The streets are free but everything worth entering requires a ticket, which is not cheap and is priced by the day. It is unavoidably a tourist operation, with reproduction shops and a hotel complex attached, and some visitors find the costumed interpretation forced. The trades, though, are genuinely skilled work and not a performance.

Nearby

Jamestown and Yorktown complete the historic triangle; Busch Gardens is next door.