At Benjamin Franklin's suggestion a school for Black children opened here in 1760, in the building known as the Williamsburg Bray School. This is the structure whose first-occupied house is believed to be the "oldest extant building in the United States dedicated to the education of Black children. The school taught free and enslaved Black children and educated potentially hundreds until its closure in 1774.
The house you face was constructed in 1760 and over time wore other names—the Dudley Digges House and the Bray-Digges House—before Methodist missionaries bought and renovated it in the mid-1920s and renamed it Brown Hall. Though its colonial origins were not visible, they were known; it was not purchased by John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s Colonial Williamsburg project and was instead acquired by the College of William & Mary in 1930. The building and its additions were moved to William & Mary’s campus and later housed the college’s military science and ROTC programs from 1980 until 2021.
After studies and an inventory, it was moved again in February 2023 to Colonial Williamsburg’s historic area, with a ribbon-cutting held on Juneteenth, 2025. Notice this building and the historic area now framing it.