The nondescript colonial building that housed the Williamsburg Bray School from 1760 to 1774 has undergone a major renovation and will be the centerpiece of a dedication ceremony on Nov. 1.
But behind the scenes, the William & Mary Bray School Lab, a unit of the Office of Strategic Cultural Partnerships, has experienced dramatic transformations of its own.
Thanks to research conducted by undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and other researchers — and with valuable information provided by descendants — a great deal has been learned about the Williamsburg Bray School and its legacies.
The W&M Bray School Lab, launched in 2021 to document the history and legacies of the school and its students, is unearthing a wealth of information about the complicated history of the teaching and learning that took place in the 18th-century schoolhouse dedicated to providing a pro-slavery religious education for Black children.
The school was funded by the London-based Associates of Dr. Bray, and as time went on, questions increased about the return on the associates’ investment.
“The goal was to shape children to be more docile, but tensions increasingly rose over money and the implication of what was being taught,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, the lab’s director. “Some people thought too much education would make the (students) unhappy with their condition.”
The Bray School building is the oldest-known extant structure in the country dedicated to the education of free and enslaved Black children. In the centuries since the school’s closure, the house has had many uses and undergone many renovations, inadvertently disguising its historic origins. In 2020, researchers positively identified it as the former home of the Williamsburg Bray School. Last year, William & Mary’s partner in the Williamsburg Bray School initiative, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, moved the building to the corner of Nassau and Francis Sts. in the Historic Area. Since then, a team of preservationists has been restoring it to its 18th-century appearance using a combination of modern and 18th-century tools and techniques.
Lab work pays off
Though it wasn’t known as the Williamsburg Bray School in its time, it was named retroactively for the Rev. Dr. Thomas Bray, an Englishman whose mission included educating Black and Indigenous children in the Americas. In addition to the school in Williamsburg, there were Bray schools in Philadelphia, New York City, Newport, Rhode Island, and Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The Bray School Lab has pored over the only surviving student rosters known to date – from 1762, 1765 and 1769 – which allow them to estimate that over its 14 years in operation, the Williamsburg school’s enrollment totaled somewhere between 300 and 400 students. Approximately 87 students are known by name. Though most of the children were enslaved, a handful were free. The students, both girls and boys, ranged in age from three to 10.
Research has found that the curriculum included reading, spelling, sewing, knitting, etiquette, comportment and, especially, Anglican doctrine.
“The idea was to teach the children to be good Christians, to be subservient, to comply,” said Elizabeth Drembus, the lab’s genealogist. “It was absolutely a self-serving endeavor.”
The Bray School Lab’s website also underwent a “refresh” this year, with new branding and a new logo. The online hub has allowed the lab to greatly expand its digital presence with an oral history archive that stands at 28 interviews and growing. Bray School Stories, a Zoom series led by Drembus, offers a new installment every month, detailing what is being learned about the school’s students and what remains unknown — at least for now. A weekly newsletter provides updates on research, findings and events, and a blog, A Reasonable Progress, helps shine a light on the work of the lab’s student thought partners, lab staff and community partners engaged in Bray School research.
The logo for the lab, created by the Cuban artist Alejandro “Alucho” Rodríguez Fornés, shows a bird in a pencil-shaped schoolhouse against the background of the students’ names. Elgersman Lee said she feels it telegraphs both innocence and restriction. “When I look at it, sometimes I think of Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘I know why the caged bird sings,’” she said. “There are so many different layers.”
On Aug. 20, the Bray School Lab marked the 250th anniversary of the closing of the Williamsburg school by recognizing the school’s only known teacher, Ann Wager, and honoring all the known Bray School students on what they estimate is the day of Wager’s death in 1774. (It is the date the school’s local trustee took her off the payroll. No exact date has been found.) Flowers labeled with the names of Wager’s students were threaded through the chain link fence around the school’s construction site. Alumna and Ph.D. candidate Nicole Brown ’13, M.A. ‘22 currently portrays Wager as a Colonial Williamsburg interpreter, while also serving as graduate assistant for the lab.
“We wanted to do something (at the building), but given that it was still an active construction site, we knew we couldn’t go inside the fence. So we got flowers, each labeled with the name of a child. One had the name of Anne Wager. And we invited people to come to the lab (located in the Barrett House on Francis Street) to pick up a flower to put it in the fence as a quiet memorial,” she said.
Records, reflection and rediscovery
The Bray School Lab has co-edited its first volume, published by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. “The Williamsburg Bray School: A History through Records, Reflection and Rediscovery,” edited by Elgersman Lee and Brown, is in press and will be available by early December.
The volume includes historical letters and contemporary essays by Bray School descendants, researchers, educators and William & Mary students. Over half of the essays were written by members of the Descendant Community; for many of the descendant community members, this marks their first publication.
“We did our best to make it easy for people to say ‘yes’ to this book project. Our message was clear: If you don’t have a computer, that doesn’t matter. If you have arthritis or difficulty writing or you’ve never written like this before, that doesn’t matter. We can make it work,” Elgersman Lee said.
For some contributors that meant videotaping their recollections, which generated an initial transcript. Each transcript went through a series of revisions, said Elgersman Lee. “After about three cycles of that, we had an essay ready to go to the editorial review stage.”
The book’s cover, like the Bray School Lab’s new logo, features a background image of students’ names derived from an actual Bray School student roster, a historical document which lists each student’s name alongside the name of their enslaver. Free children, like the Ashby and Jones children, were listed as “free” or “free negro.”
“We intentionally focused on the column of student names rather than the names of their enslavers because it’s important to place the humanity of the child at the center of this project,” Elgersman Lee said.
Janice Canaday, Colonial Williamsburg’s African American community engagement manager, said creating the book “was a momentous experience.”
“Being a child raised to think there was never anything valuable about African Americans that needed to be talked about, it was incredible to know that now no one can say that we weren’t here. Or we were just labor,” Canaday said. “We really do have a story, and we’re taking it to the world.”
A community project
The work continues to make discoveries about the students, which typically begins with the name of their enslaver.
“People responsible for sending children to the Bray School were fairly prominent so they generated quite a number of records,” Elgersman Lee said. The surnames are a Who’s Who of Williamsburg’s earliest leaders and founders – Harrison, Randolph, Blair, to name a few.
Equally important, according to Elgersman Lee, is to set the existence of the school in historical context, examining the motivations of those who developed the institution and its pro-Christian curriculum. Researchers are particularly interested in the legacies of children who took ownership of their education and used it in ways the founders never intended, students like Isaac Bee, whose name appears on the 1765 roster.
Drembus, the genealogist, says he ran away or “self-liberated” at least twice. In the “Runaway Slave” advertisements posted by Lewis Burwell in September 1774 in the Virginia Gazette, Burwell sought information about Bee’s whereabouts noting that Bee might have believed he had a right to his freedom because he was the son of a free man.
The ad also said, “He can read.”
Drembus encourages people who believe they may have family information to comb records they may have in their homes or churches. At a presentation in early October at Grace Church Yorktown (established in 1697), a member of the audience said she thought there might be parish records about people enslaved by the church in the 18th century. Drembus said, “Let’s talk!”
“This is a community project now,” Drembus said.
Related story from The Washington Post: Lost for centuries, Virginia school for enslaved children gets new life
Related story from The Associated Press: Inside a 1760 schoolhouse for Black children is a complicated history of slavery and resilience
Susan Corbett, Communications Specialist