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“If you have questions, ask them as we move through,” our guide tells us. “I’ll tell you, there’s a lot about this place that I find confusing.”
As our tour group follows Andrew Franks through the rain, he points out various places of interest: the competing silversmiths, homes of prominent citizens and the courthouse with its stocks and pillories out front. Judicial processes are of special interest to Franks, who will not tell us exactly what crime he committed back in England, only that the judge ultimately gave him a choice between the gallows, the navy, or seven to 14 years in the colonies as a convict-servant. “Here I am, still kind of wondering which was the correct choice.”
We are walking towards the reconstructed Capitol building at the end of Duke of Gloucester Street, where America’s framers delivered soaring speeches about the social contract, natural rights and freedom. Franks, the reluctant colonist, is not impressed. “They call themselves planters. How much planting do they do?” he asks contemptuously. “Other people are doing the work for them. They have the time to leave their farms and come here.”
The trees that line the town’s main drag are taller than they were 250 years ago, and the road is far less muddy, but aside from that, everything looks almost exactly as it did when Patrick Henry and George Washington walked these streets — including the occasional sight of Patrick Henry and George Washington.
Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg: the world’s largest living history museum.
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