previous next

Williamsburg,

A city and county seat of James City county, Va., 3 miles from the James River and 50 miles southeast of Richmond. The city was first settled in 1632; was the seat of the royal government prior to the Revolutionary War; and afterwards was the State capital till 1780, when the government was transferred to Richmond. The capitol was completed in 1704, burned, rebuilt in 1752, and again burned about 1831. Williamsburg is the seat of William and Mary College (q. v.), of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum of Virginia, opened in 1773, and the oldest institution of its kind in the United States; and of an Episcopal church dating from 1678. The city was the scene of a noted battle in the Civil War. See Williamsburg, battle of.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1831 AD (1)
1780 AD (1)
1773 AD (1)
1752 AD (1)
1704 AD (1)
1678 AD (1)
1632 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: