Public Gaol

Built in 1704, the Public Gaol was Williamsburg's answer to a simple problem: a capital city generates crime, and crime requires somewhere to put people while the court decides what to do with them. What ended up inside its walls was something else entirely — debtors and the enslaved, Tories and Continental soldiers, and, after Edward Teach met his end off the Outer Banks in 1718, the surviving crew of Blackbeard himself, shackled to the walls awaiting trial.

The original structure survived. That's the thing worth understanding before you walk in. The stocks, the pillory, the shackles — they aren't reproductions staged for effect. The building held all of that, and kept holding it, through every war and political reversal the city absorbed. Go for the pirates if you need a reason. Stay because the walls are real.