The College of William & Mary has maintained a campus in what is now Williamsburg, Virginia, since 1693. The cornerstone of the Wren Building, then known as the College Building and the oldest surviving academic building in the United States, was laid in 1695. The college's 18th-century campus includes the College Building, the President's House, and Brafferton–all of which were constructed using slave labor. These buildings were altered and damaged during the succeeding centuries before receiving significant restorations by the Colonial Williamsburg program during the 1920s and 1930s.
Additional construction and acquisitions have developed and expanded the college's Williamsburg campus in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Charles M. Robinson and his associates designed a number of Colonial Revival buildings on what is now the college's Old Campus. Additional construction later in the century created New Campus. Recent additions to the Williamsburg campus include buildings for the college's Law School, School of Education, and Mason School of Business.
William & Mary has maintained campuses outside of Williamsburg since 1925. The Colleges of William & Mary integrated William & Mary and four other campuses into a university system in the early 1960s; only Richard Bland College remains affiliated. A campus for the college's Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) graduate school is located in Gloucester Point site. VIMS also maintains a laboratory in Wachapreague and a research facility along the Rappahannock River.
History 17th and 18th centuries
On February 8, 1693, King William III of England and Queen Mary II granted a royal charter that established the College of William & Mary in Virginia and made James Blair the first president of the college. Blair returned to the Colony of Virginia in October that year and the Virginia General Assembly began debating the location of the new college's campus. The assembly selected Middle Plantation, a spot roughly equidistant between the York River and James River on the Virginia Peninsula. Middle Plantation lay between two palisades, with the campus site just west of the second, 1633-authorized fortification which ran from Queen's Creek to Archer's Hope Creek (now known as College Creek). The college trustees purchased 330 acres from Thomas Ballard for £170 and assigned Thomas Hadley to begin developing a portion of the property.;
Some of the college's early funds were devoted to restoring a degraded Middle Plantation schoolhouse that likely hosted William & Mary's first classes. Daniel Parke Jr. was given a contract to produce around 800,000 bricks. Construction was stalled by "intrigue", which Blair attributed to Virginia governor and opponent to the college Edmund Andros. Despite political resistance, the cornerstone of the College Building, now known as the Wren Building, was laid on August 8, 1695.
Blair had contracted Hadley while in England, bringing both plans and construction materials with them to Virginia. Planned as a quadrangle, only the north and east wings were built. The College Building's construction involved English masons, indentured servants, and enslaved persons. The enslaved persons, owned by the contractor, were assigned the hard labor.; In 1724, Hugh Jones wrote that the College Building was "first modeled by Sir Christopher Wren". Since then, Wren's supposed involvement in the building's design has been the subject of lengthy debate. The College Building was completed in 1697. It thought to have originally been three stories tall and topped with a two-story cupola. Swiss traveler Franz Ludwig Michel executed the earliest known surviving depiction of the College Building in 1702.;
Opposition to Andros in England led to him being recalled and replaced by Francis Nicholson as colonial governor in 1698. After the statehouse in Jamestown burned in October 1698, both Nicholson and Blair supported moving the capital from the Jamestown to Middle Plantation. A series of orations were given at the college on May Day 1699 before a crowd which included government officials. One of these orations, possibly sponsored by Nicholson, persuaded those assembled to move the capital to the college's community. The move was passed by assembly in June and Middle Plantation was reestablished as a city named Williamsburg. Nicholson planned the city like he had at Annapolis, Maryland, and extended a nearly mile-long street named for the Duke of Gloucester from the College Building on its western terminus to the new Capitol (constructed 1701–1705).; ;
The college's Board of Visitors offered the College Building as a host for all branches of Virginia's government until the Capitol was completed. This offer was accepted and the College Building served as a statehouse from October 1700 until April 1704. During the night of October 29–30, 1705, the College Building burned. The library and furnishings were destroyed, as were scientific instruments donated by John Locke. Queen Anne donated £500, which was enough to clear the burnt remains of the building, and John Tullitt purchased the lumber rights to the college's properties for £2000. Additional funds being required, the Queen donated another £500 in 1710. Governor Alexander Spotswood, knowledgeable about architecture, sponsored the reconstruction. The College Building rebuilding was completed in 1715 to a design credited to Spotswood.; The 1715 rebuild was two and a half-stories tall and featured a possibly shorter cupola. The Bodleian Plate depicts this iteration of the structure with three stories of full masonry and a loggia.
The Brafferton was built in 1723 south of the College Building to support the college's Indian school. It was renovated in 1734 to accommodate dormers, provide for a library on the second floor, and add living space to the third floor. Henry Cary Jr. designed the President's House, which was built to the College Building's north in 1732–1733. The College Building's chapel and south wing were completed in 1732.; By the early 18th century, the College Yard containing these structures was walled, as depicted on the Bodleian Plate. A garden that may have been designed by James Road, the gardener at Hampton Court Palace, remained into the 1770s.
With only occasional repairs, the College Building remained roughly unchanged until the American Revolutionary War. In 1772, Thomas Jefferson drew a plan to expand the building and make it a complete quadrangle; pre-Revolution events stalled this project before much work was done. During the 1781 Yorktown campaign of the war, British general Charles Cornwallis occupied the President's House in June. From that fall until summer the next year, the College Building was used as a hospital by French troops. The President's House was a hospital for French officers from October to December 1781, when it was accidentally burned; the French government paid to rebuild it.
Jefferson, who had graduated from William & Mary, referred to the college as "rude, misshapen pile" reminiscent of a brick kiln in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia. When planning construction for the University of Virginia, Jefferson considered risks such as fire and disease in having all a university's functions within a single building, as was the case at William & Mary. Instead, he would support a plan for an "Academical Village" comprising a complex arranged "around an open square of grass and trees".
19th century
A tornado damaged the Brafferton in 1834; it was heavily renovated in 1849. The College Building burned again in 1859, destroying marble tablets in the chapel, the library, and scientific equipment. It was rebuilt and opened to students by October that year. The reconstruction was to a new Italianate design by Henry Exall and Eban Faxon. This short-lived design sported two three-story towers and enclosed the loggia.
The American Civil War saw the campus host troops from both the Confederacy (which the college supported) and the Union. As Confederates arrived in the city, the College Building was used as a barracks. The night prior to the Battle of Williamsburg, a Confederate brigade was posted behind the College Building. On the day of the battle–May 5, 1862–Confederate troops were held in reserve on the campus; rear guard commander General James Longstreet utilized the campus for his headquarters during the battle. Immediately following the battle, the campus served as hospitals for the wounded.
The college and Williamsburg came under Union occupation following the battle, with pickets just beyond the campus. Until 1864, the city and campus were on the de facto border between the Confederacy and Union. A Confederate cavalry raid briefly seized the town from the Union on September 9, 1862, but soon withdrew. In retaliation, troops from the Union's 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment burned the College Building that afternoon. Another Confederate raid fought Union pickets on the campus in 1863. Defensive trenches were dug along the campus, with windows and entrances facing the Confederate lines bricked up. The Brafferton housed Union officers during the occupation. Following the war's conclusion, the President's House was used by Union soldiers stationed there to oversee Reconstruction.
An addition was made to the President's House in 1865 to house professors while awaiting the College Building's reconstruction. Rebuilt between 1867 and 1869, the College Building's walls had survived the previous fires which allowed their reuse in this "more sober" rebuilding that featured a wider center pavilion, no towers, and a small cupola. Alfred L. Rives's design removed the Italianate frontispiece in favor of a three-bay pedimented pavilion. The façade's center bay featured an arcaded loggia.; The college purchased ten acres on the former site of the Governor's Palace in 1870, building a brick schoolhouse on the site using funds from Mary Whaley, who wished to commemorate her late son Mattey. From 1882 until 1888, college operations were suspended. College president Benjamin Stoddert Ewell rang the College Building's bell through these "silent years", an act that according to tradition "maintained the royal charter and kept the college alive". William & Mary reopened in 1888, by which point the Brafferton had suffered substantial damage from sitting empty. The Wren Chapel's styling became Victorian by the 1890s.
20th century
In the early 20th century, president Lyon Gardiner Tyler initiated a campaign to develop and expand the college's campus; in 1906, William & Mary had become a public university of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The subsequent growth required substantial fundraising, exemplified by Tyler financing the construction of a new library (built 1908–1909, now Tucker Hall) by raising $20,000 () to attain a matching Carnegie Foundation donation. Tyler also oversaw the construction of a greenhouse (built 1909) near the College Building and the Tyler Hall dormitory (built 1916, now the Reves Center) on the corner of Jamestown Road and Boundary Street.