Wren Building, College of William and Mary

The foundation went into the ground in 1695, before Williamsburg was even a city — before the capital had moved from Jamestown, before the street grid existed, before most of what would become colonial Virginia's political center had been imagined. The building that rose on that site, known today as the Sir Christopher Wren Building, is the oldest college building in continuous use in the United States.

It has burned three times — in 1705, 1859, and 1862. Each time, the walls held. Each time, the college rebuilt within them. That stubbornness is the real story here: not the architecture, not the attribution to Wren (which historians have debated since the 1920s, and still haven't settled), but the simple fact of endurance. The present building is a restoration completed between 1928 and 1931, returned to its early 18th-century appearance based on an 18th-century depiction known as the Bodleian Plate. The original 1695 masonry still comprises the majority of the current walls.

The building also carries a harder history. The workers who built the first College Building included indentured servants and enslaved persons. The enslaved workers, owned by a contractor, performed the hard labor. That the building endured is partly their work.

What happened inside matters too. In 1776, Phi Beta Kappa — the first Greek-letter academic fraternity in America — was founded here. Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary. The orations delivered on the building's steps in 1699 helped persuade the colonial government to move the capital from Jamestown to Middle Plantation, the settlement that became Williamsburg.

Classes and faculty offices still occupy the building. The chapel hosts active worship. It remains, as the college has called it, the soul of the place — which is not marketing. It's just what 330 years of use looks like.