An American Nerd Girl

When you read a book, do you ever feel the need to go to the place it takes place in?

As if being there will somehow call up its characters into specter like forms. Their presence reenacting the words on the page. Scenes happening as you walk through the rooms of the houses and streets.

I took a college course, technically two focused basically on that feeling. It was a joint English and History class set in Bath, England. The stories we were exploring through location were Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I don’t like Northanger Abbey, so the pages didn’t come alive for me. Persuasion, on the other hand. That most certainly did. Standing on Union Street, where Anne and Captain Wentworth finally gave up the ghost and submitted to their feelings, gave me goosebumps.

That wasn’t the first time I had been struck by the call of a story’s location. No, I was much younger. It was on the same trip I learned my love of rollercoasters. On the way down, I realized I was going to come into the orbit of Williamsburg. The colonial site to be specific.

What was so special about Colonial Williamsburg? That was the home of Felicity Merriman, of course.

For anyone not in the know, Felicity is the main character in a short series of books put out by American Girl. They are set just a few years before the American Revolution. And I was fascinated by her story. I don’t know how many times I read and reread the books. I even combed through the appendix that had additional information about the period more than once.

So the realization that I was in the vicinity of the historical location and it was somewhere I could visit, well, my mind was blown. There has never been a better-mounted backseat campaign. But, I was arguing against time and money. Two things nearly impossible to win against.

I was disappointed at the time, but if my campaign had been successful, I would have missed Kings Dominion. And that trade-off might not have worked out as well as I thought it would have been at the time. Fast forward umpteen years though, and this American Nerd Girl set foot in Colonial Williamsburg.

Being an adult, this trip was not about seeing a place where a fictional character lived. There was plenty of historical motivation for me to step foot in Colonial Williamsburg. The time period is an interesting one to look back at. I was also interested in comparing the differences between the city-sized recreation and the village sized Old Sturbridge I am familiar with.

I totally got to take a tour of the Palace where Felicity and Elizabeth attended a ball.

The kid in me will not die. Yes, Adam got snippets of the Felicity narrative as we walked outside the palace gardens. Yes, I looked for a general store that fit the description of the Merriman’s establishment. It wasn’t open.

I’ll try to digress a bit. There is a lot to say on the place outside of the context of Felicity.

I didn’t realize how much space the historical site would take up. The fact that the location had been a city should have been a clue. But it wasn’t till we were handed a map that I was clued in. While Adam and I were there, we marveled at how big the site was. Our Sturbridge site never felt so vast.

Well, this is one of those “Objects are closer than they appear” moments. Google tells me that Williamsburg is smaller than Sturbridge in acreage. However, Sturbridge is a farming focused village with large fields set aside. In any event, we barely scratched the surface in our one day at the Virginia site. That said, I don’t know how deep we’ve gone into Sturbridge’s content over several visits.

We entered by way of the visitors center bridge. Set into the concrete are two sets of milestone markers. One set rolls back time as guests walk toward the preserved past. The second is for the return trip to the present day. Once inside the boundaries of the colonial remnant, you are treated to getting an up-close look at individual components of the time.

Stepping inside the shoemakers offers more than a look at the tools and materials used by tradesmen. The actor working in the space discusses the difficulties facing shoe and boot makers in pre-Revolution America. Not only did they need to compete with their neighbor footwear crafters, but they also had to contend with the tradesmen across the Atlantic. At the tailor, we were treated to a lecture on the lack of a viable means to manufacture cloth en mass in the colonies. The man working at the shop discussed how mass production had to wait until Eli Whitney came along nearly thirty years later. Trade wasn’t the only aspect discussed within the city limits.

The Governor’s Palace opened windows into the aristocracy and the political climate of the day. Time spent in the Capitol building offers a look into government workings. Reenactments of trials from the period happen at the courthouse. Even their taverns offer fare resembling colonial staples.

On top of all of that, the venue goes a step further in reviving the history preserved here. The shops and houses are not just buildings. They have narratives of their own in the context of the city’s history. Trade shops are based on real establishments that existed during the 1770s. Families from the time period are associated with the homes found on the property. This attention to detail keeps the venue from being an empty shell bent on boring guests with facts and figures. Williamsburg immerses visitors into the life and times of 1770s Virginia.

In Bath, when I was standing on that sidewalk on Union Street, I was conjuring Austen’s characters into being. Walking around Virginia was different. The twenty-first century poked out in corners here and there. The actors were not in full role. Colonial context and modern comparisons were discussed in tandem. There, in Williamsburg, it felt like we were the conjured ghosts floating around the city.