Starting in January, the world's largest living history museum would celebrate its 100th anniversary, and Kurt Smith would hit 10 years "interpreting" Thomas Jefferson, a major role at the Virginia museum.
As one of the site's Nation Builders -- first-person interpreters portraying figures of Revolutionary America -- Smith regularly fields autograph requests and accepts gifts: a custom mug tiled with his own face, a vinyl album of original Jefferson ballads. The devotion is well-earned: Smith can quote Jefferson verbatim and cites Seneca and Enlightenment philosophers without blinking.
"It's like if Hollywood were 300 acres and didn't extend beyond history nerds," Smith said.
For many, the Colonial Williamsburg experience begins and ends with a school field trip. While history buffs may revel in the costumes and architecture, it all can feel a little too earnest to some. But over my three decades of visits -- starting as a 13-year-old kid from Washington state -- I've found much to love and, on every visit, some new kernel of history to obsess over.
The museum's evolution is the subject of "Colonial Williamsburg: The First 100 Years," on view through 2029. I visited the exhibit and found a fascinating deep-dive not into our country's history, but into how we remember it, including through the work of the dramatic interpreters that are the museum's main attraction.
By 1926, W.A.R. Goodwin, an episcopal reverend with a singular mission, had convinced the financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. to underwrite the transformation of the quiet Southern town, which had lost its political significance when the capital moved to Richmond in 1780, into a museum.
His ambition was mostly architectural: Let the bricks do the talking by preserving the original buildings. But as soon as furnishings and artifacts began to fill those spaces, Goodwin and Rockefeller felt like something was missing. "They realized they had to have some way to communicate what that stuff was," said Neal Hurst, one of the curators of the new exhibition.
The exhibition introduces Williamsburg's first interpreters: mostly older white women who, as costumed hostesses, were tasked with guiding visitors. Like walking museum plaques, they glided through rooms in silk brocade gowns, panniers extending their hips to improbable widths, dispensing facts about furnishings. "They were really more object-based," Katie McKinney, one of the exhibition's curators, said.
At the same time, another kind of interpretation was taking shape behind the scenes. In those early years, Black men in livery -- many descended from families once enslaved in the area -- steered horse carriages down the main thoroughfare. "The program was started to bring the hostesses to work so that they wouldn't show up in cars," McKinney said. But quickly, the coachmen took on the role of unofficial docents, recounting a much less buttoned-up version of Williamsburg's history to the visiting public.
As Marvin-Alonzo Greer, a former supervisor of the site's African American History Initiative, said, "If you wanted to understand who actually lived there, how the town functioned, you took a carriage ride."
Since those early days, the interpretation program has grown into something far more ambitious and multifaceted. The white women in bonnets still make appearances, but so do performers like Stephen Seals, who portrays James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved Virginian turned revolutionary spy. The bar for interpreters, who perform throughout the day around the village, remains high: Smith spent six months in the archives before he was even allowed to consider sporting a powdered wig, much less address the public.
Shed your too-cool-for-school attitude; embrace the weirdness and Colonial Williamsburg can be spellbinding in a way a regular old museum can't. Seals recalled one production that led to two audience members overtaken by the scene shoving actors portraying slave owners. "That was scary," he said. "But it also shows the power of when you truly end up connecting people to the work."
Occasionally, experiments fail, like when the team tried piping in a less-than-convincing recording of a rooster over loud speakers. The jarring sound ended up startling visitors out of the experience, rather than drawing them in. As Bill Barker, who portrayed Jefferson for 26 years before Smith, put it, interpretive misfires aren't failures so much as proof of concept -- "reminders that Colonial Williamsburg," like the nation itself, "is a work in progress."