Colonial Williamsburg Capitol

Patrick Henry stood in this building on May 29, 1765, and delivered the Caesar-Brutus speech against the Stamp Act. Whether anyone in the room fully understood what had just started is another question.

The H-shaped Capitol — two buildings connected by an arcade — was the seat of the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1705, six years after the colonial capital moved from Jamestown to what was then called Middle Plantation and renamed Williamsburg. Henry Cary, a contractor who had been finishing work on the College of William and Mary's Wren Building, built it. The west wing served the General Court and the colony's secretary; the east wing, the House of Burgesses and its clerk. The legislature actually moved in during 1704, though Cary didn't finish until 1705.

That building burned in 1747. The second Capitol, built by James Skelton, was finished in 1753. Henry's speech happened in Skelton's building — and so did a great deal else. Washington, Jefferson, George Mason, George Wythe, and Richard Henry Lee all worked these rooms. Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights was debated here. On June 29, 1776, Virginia declared independence from Great Britain and wrote its first constitution — four days before Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

The building the Capitol became was last used as a capitol on December 24, 1779, when the General Assembly adjourned to reconvene at Richmond. What stands now is neither of those buildings. It is a reconstruction of the first Capitol — the 1705 Cary structure — opened to the public on February 24, 1934. Architects chose it over the second Capitol for its documentation and its unusual architecture. Later historians have noted that parts of the reconstruction, particularly the foundations, drew on contemporary architectural ideas as much as historical evidence.

Which makes the place honest in a way it doesn't intend to be. The building is an interpretation. So is every story that begins here.