Peyton Randolph House

The house started as three bays, built around 1715 by William Robertson, clerk of the Governor's Council. By 1724 a story-and-a-half tenement had been added to the east. Then Peyton Randolph joined them with a four-bay connector — distinguished by a marble chimneypiece and paneled woodwork — and moved in. He stayed until he died in 1775.

That's the structure. Here's what happened inside it.

Randolph served as Speaker of the House of Burgesses for nine years, then presided over the First Continental Congress in 1774 — the man the colonial leadership trusted to run the room when it mattered most. His home became, by consequence, the kind of place where history moved through on its way to becoming history. The Comte de Rochambeau used it as his headquarters during the Yorktown campaign. Lafayette stayed here in 1824. Washington visited more than once. The house absorbed all of it and kept standing.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation restored the property in 1939-40, reconstructing the east wing. What you see today is the result of that work set against what survived from Robertson's original three bays forward.

What the brief doesn't let you look away from: enslaved people lived and worked on this property throughout Randolph's tenure. The man who helped organize the case for American liberty owned human beings. The house held both of those facts at the same time, as it still does.

Walk the property for that reason — not the architecture, though the marble chimneypiece is worth your attention. Go because this is one of the places where the republic's founding contradictions were not theoretical. They were domestic. They happened in this house.