Object Lessons: Finding Ways to Connect to William & Mary’s Past

The College of William and Mary has been accumulating objects, buildings and memorials for more than 300 years. What can we learn from them in the modern day?

I first learned about the College of William and Mary on a family visit to Colonial Williamsburg when I was 12. After touring the Sir Christopher Wren Building, I assumed that the College was merely a set of preserved buildings rather than an active university. Though I enjoyed history, I couldn’t imagine actually attending an institution that seemed so stuck in the past.

Of course, fate has a sense of humor. Six years later, I ended up enrolling, and what I found here in Williamsburg bears little resemblance to the static museum piece I had imagined. At the same time, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for how the College chooses to incorporate many parts of its long history, especially as it goes beyond the rose-tinted Revolutionary period portrayed in Colonial Williamsburg. As a historic institution, the College would be doing itself a disservice to ignore its past as it plows ahead into the future.

When I met with Charles Fulcher ’99, the director of Wren operations and events, he took me upstairs to the Blue Room, which was originally used for college officials to meet with students to discuss their academic performance or conduct. As he described student experiences on their way to the room, I found their trepidation deeply relatable. These types of disciplinary meetings still occur at the College today, and knowing that students 300 years ago had similar experiences allowed me to feel more connected to the Wren Building’s long history.

“I describe it as a living, breathing place,” said Fulcher. “It is not an antique tucked behind glass. That is a huge benefit to us as we engage the public in this space ... It's not a place where you have to imagine students having class 200 years ago. Students are doing it right now.”

I was also curious to see how the Wren Building approaches more difficult historical truths, especially in the wake of national shifts regarding how that history is portrayed. After all, the Wren Building itself was built by enslaved people, and many early students at the College brought enslaved children with them to serve as valets.

“To me, it's really important that the complicated history is really just the fuller story,” Fulcher said. “And as the fuller story, it's important that it's just shared as a matter of course ... It's not like we're giving a tour, and we say ‘now is the part of the tour when we talk about the dark stories of our past’ and everything stops. I think it fills out the story and keeps things more related when it's just folded into everything else.”

One way by which the College examines the fuller picture of its history is through the Lemon Project, which “researches the lives of Africans and African Americans from the 17th century to the present and shares this knowledge on and off campus,” among other goals. Upon speaking with Interim Director Jajuan Johnson about how the Lemon Project engages the public in its work, he said that he frequently meets with representatives of other universities to discuss the research process regarding the Hearth Memorial.

“What was our process like? How are we inclusive in that process? How do we go about the research? How were the decisions made for that site to be chosen, and what's the sustainability of it? ... There’s been so much buy-in at every level, from students, faculty, and community members,” he said.

What resonated with me was the intentionality behind creating a physical addition to the landscape of the College, especially in such proximity to the Wren Building. Johnson also walked me through the Lemon Project’s exhibition near Read and Relax in Earl Gregg Swem Library. By adding physical reminders of the 170 years during which the College relied on the labor of enslaved people and its subsequent participation in racial segregation, the Lemon Project is filling in the historic narrative for the future.

“We still have much work to do, and that's what this journey is about,” said Johnson. “The project is called The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation. And the reconciliation is not always a destination.”

On the same floor as the Lemon Project’s exhibition lies Special Collections, in which archivists work to ensure that future students will remember the College of today. Rick Mikulski is an instruction librarian at Swem and an interim archivist. When I met with him, I was surprised to learn that he actively introduces new objects representing student life to the archives, such as student publications and performance recordings. The rigorous process that the archivists go through to add these pieces signifies the high regard in which they hold them.

“When a student group gives us materials, we sit with them for maybe half an hour and go through the items, so that when we do put the official description in, we put in the right materials and identify the right people,” he said. “If we need to explain what the event was, we make sure that we have that information down. The big thing is partnering with the organization that created the materials to make sure that the context is correct.” 

These conversations revealed that the College's greatest strength may be its relationship with the tangible. Abstract learning is central to any university, but William and Mary offers something rarer: physical traces of the lives lived here, both in the past and present. The Wren Building, the Hearth Memorial, and objects donated from student organizations don't just preserve the past — they allow it to connect with people in the present.

“Downstairs, we have one of the old desks that was in the Wren Building 100 years ago that students sat in, and there's scribbles on it and graffiti and carvings,”  Mikulski said. “And I think that materiality really connects you to the past in a way that supplements other forms of academic learning. Seeing the desk where students sat and got bored in class and carved their names into it in 1805. There's a connection there that you just don’t get from reading one of the excellent histories of the College.”