“I’m just wishing I could hear their voices,” Merideth said, thinking about what it must have been like back then, with so many young students in a classroom space of just 17 by 14 feet.
W&M in WAPO: Lost for centuries, Virginia school for enslaved children gets new life
Tonia Cansler Merideth stepped inside the 18th-century building and paused, as if listening. The wide floorboards had been worn down over the centuries, the newel at the base of the stairway smoothed by hundreds of hands. Propped along a wall next to a brick fireplace was a copy of a roster from the 1760s listing, in flowing script, the names of the children who attended the school that year. Three of the children named were free. Twenty-seven were enslaved.
The Williamsburg Bray School is expected to be dedicated as a part of Colonial Williamsburg on Friday, 250 years after the school closed on the tumultuous brink of the American Revolution. The building, overlooked for many years in a town fixated on history, is believed to be the country’s oldest surviving school created for Black children. The school is expected to open to the public in the spring when its restoration is complete.
