Powder Magazine

This postcard shows the Powder Magazine at Williamsburg, the octagonal brick structure which housed eighteenth-century Williamsburg’s gunpowder and weaponry. On April 21, 1775, Colonial governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, ordered the gunpowder to be removed from the magazine and confiscated on a royal navy ship. Virginians took this as an act of war, and Patrick Henry led a small band of militia toward Williamsburg to reclaim the gunpowder. The incident came to a resolution without violence. The magazine later became a symbol of revolutionary Virginia, and during the Civil War confederate soldiers again used the magazine to store gunpowder and firearms. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities restored the magazine as a historic site in the late nineteenth century.