Early Buildings at the College of William and Mary (Circa 1740)

Three early buildings at the College of William and Mary—the Brafferton, the Wren Building, and the President's House—are seen in this detail from a modern engraving made from an original mid-18th-century copperplate. The so-called "Bodleian Plate," once part of the vast collection at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, lay unlisted and forgotten for some 150 years before being recognized as the most important visual record of colonial-era Williamsburg.

The Brafferton building (at left), completed in 1723, was the site of the Indian School established at the college. One of William and Mary's goals was to "teach the Indian boys to read, and write, and vulgar Arithmetick … to teach them thoroughly the Catechism and the Principles of the Christian Religion."