British governors of Virginia once lived here at the Governor's Palace, funded by the House of Burgesses in 1706. Imagine a house funded by the House of Burgesses in 1706 at the behest of Lt. Governor Edward Nott, a building begun from 1706 onward to serve a colonial capital established in 1699.
In 1710 its first official resident was Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood, acting in place of the absentee governor, George Hamilton, 1st Earl of Orkney. For most of the period that Williamsburg served as capital — until the capital relocated to Richmond in 1780 — this was the governor’s home.
The original palace later served as the official residence of two U.S. state governors, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, before the main building burned down in 1781 while the outbuildings survived for some time after. What you see now sits on that original site: a reconstruction from the 1930s and one of the two largest buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, the other being the colonial capitol. Notice the reconstructed façade, the surviving outbuildings nearby, and the colonial capitol standing across the way.