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He was successful, and on February 8, 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II granted a charter which established "a certain Place of universal Study, a perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences, consisting of one President, six Masters or Professors, and an hundred Scholars more or less." In 1691 the Reverend James Blair, the commissary – or representative – of the Church of England in Virginia, was sent to London by the General Assembly to secure a charter for a college. The Indian uprising of 1622 and the revocation of the Virginia Company charter in 1624 caused this initial attempt to be abandoned. Interest in founding a college in Virginia was expressed as early as 1619, when the Virginia Company of London undertook to establish a "university" at Henrico on the James River about twelve miles below the present city of Richmond. The major components of the project were restoration of the architectural features such as floors and paneling replacement of mechanical systems safety upgrades and repair and stabilization of the walls and foundation. To prepare the Wren Building for its fourth century of use, the university completed a comprehensive renewal and replacement project in 1999-2000.
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Classes are still held in the Wren Building, which also is home to several faculty offices. Each time the interior of the structure was rebuilt, and for more than three centuries, it has been "the soul of the College." In the building, generations of William & Mary students have attended classes and lectures, enjoyed meals and attended chapel services. The Wren Building has been gutted by fire three times - in 1705, 18. It was constructed between 16, before Williamsburg was founded, when the capital of the colony of Virginia was still located at Jamestown, and the tract of land between the James and York rivers which was to become Williamsburg was populated by crude timber buildings and known as "Middle Plantation." Much of the 1928–1931 Wren-ish chapel interior is by Thomas Tileston Waterman.The Sir Christopher Wren Building at William & Mary is the oldest college building still standing in the United States and the oldest of the restored public buildings in Williamsburg. Following considerable debate, this pavilion was removed and the surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century brickwork was incorporated into a restoration that returned the building to its second appearance, including the chapel. Remarkably, the walls survived another fire sufficiently to be used in a more sober 1867–1869 rebuilding with a wider center pavilion, sans towers. Likewise, when the Brafferton building was constructed in 1723, followed by the President's House in 1732–1733, there was clearly an outward orientation, directing the college toward the town rather than in upon itself.Īfter the 1859 fire, architects Henry Exall and Eban Faxon redesigned the building in Italianate garb, adding a pair of three-story towers at the front and enclosing the loggia to house classrooms and a stair. Yet by 1729–1732, when the chapel had been added as a second rear wing, its end wall was expensively finished with good brickwork and round windows, and the corresponding wall of the hall was rebuilt in the same manner, suggesting little interest in further enclosure.
Wren building full#
There is evidence that the building was intended to grow into a full quadrangle, and Lord Dunmore apparently asked Jefferson to produce a plan in 1771 or 1772. But the rear, shown on the famous copperplate probably engraved for William Byrd's now lost history of Virginia, retained three full masonry stories, including a loggia. The initial incarnation was a full three and one-half stories above a relatively high cellar and thirteen bays long, with a sizable hall in a rear ell-a remarkable edifice almost certainly unequaled by any other seventeenth-century building in the still rough-and-tumble Chesapeake.Īfter the 1705 fire, the facade was reworked with only two and one-half stories and a cupola that was apparently lower than the original. Hugh Jones wrote in The Present State of Virginia (1724) that the building was “first modeled by Sir Christopher Wren, adapted to the Nature of the Country by the Gentlemen there,” creating a longrunning debate about the origins of the design with little prospect of resolution.
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It faced down the ridge between the James and York river drainages and so became the western terminus of the town's main street. The first William and Mary building, still standing front and center after three fires (1705, 1859, and 1862), was begun in 1695, four years before establishment of the town.