Word: williamsburg
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When John D. Rockefeller Jr. visited Williamsburg, Va., in 1926, it had all the charm of an unkempt graveyard. Block after block of ramshackle, weather-leached houses seemed to lean into each other for support. Rockefeller threw his formidable support into founding and nurturing Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., a richly endowed corporation that transformed the city's old section into a tourist attraction by painstakingly restoring its splendor as Virginia's former capital. Ever since, Colonial Williamsburg has been successfully transforming history into a lively happening...
Last week in Williamsburg, Arkansas' Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, who also serves as chairman of the corporation's board of trustees, announced a plan that could have as much impact on the area as anything his father ever instigated. Taking time out from the Southern Governors' Conference, Rockefeller reported that he had made a deal with Beer Baron August A. Busch Jr. to build the largest single private industrial development in Virginia's history. Just outside Williamsburg, the Anheuser-Busch Co., producer of Budweiser and Michelob, will put up a brewery, as well as an industrial park...
...Skills. Since Colonial Williamsburg opened in 1934, it has drawn 17 million visitors. Over this Fourth of July weekend, 14,000 more are expected to walk through the town where Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry learned the skills and frustrations of representative government by sitting in the colonial House of Burgesses. Visitors can gawk at its carefully reconstructed saddle shops and taverns, watch trained 20th century craftsmen and their apprentices produce guns, weave flax, and cast candles with the laborious, loving skill of their 18th century predecessors. They can dine at the King's Arms, where costumed waiters slightly...
Decline & Rescue. One of America's first planned cities, Williamsburg was laid out in 1699 by Governor Francis Nicholson as a replacement for the outgrown capital of Jamestown. It thrived until late in the Revolutionary War, when the rebel government, fearful of a British attack from the sea, moved the capital inland to Richmond. With only the College of William and Mary and a state insane asylum left to support the town, Williamsburg slowly declined into a sleepy bastion of seedy gentility...
...young Biblical scholar named W.A.R. Goodwin came to serve as pastor at Williamsburg's Bruton Parish Church. Over the slow years of his pastorate, he walked much, looked long, thought constantly about the town's past and realized that behind the Victorian storefronts of the day there still survived the stubborn structure of the old town, along with a hard core of dilapidated but still sound colonial houses...