AA-2026-E87E51
On the image
By the 1950s Colonial Williamsburg had been under reconstruction for nearly thirty years, and the Rockefeller money had done its work well enough that a visitor strolling the brick footpath of Duke of Gloucester Street could almost forget the twentieth century — which was, of course, the entire point. The white clapboard buildings with their black shutters and lantern-style lamp posts had been restored, reconstructed, or simply invented to a standard of colonial authenticity that the original colonists, who mostly lived in rougher circumstances, would not have recognised. A yellow heraldic banner hangs from one of the shopfronts, the kind of decorative period detail the foundation deployed with great seriousness to signal that commerce dressed in costume was still commerce. A couple walks away from the camera in winter coats, a 1950s sedan just visible at the left, both of them solid reminders that this was a living tourist town, not a ruin. The whole enterprise rested on the confident mid-century belief that you could fully recover the past if you had enough funding and a sufficiently firm opinion about what the past ought to look like.
Visually related — by likeness
Duke of Gloucester Street, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-E87E51. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/duke-of-gloucester-street-colonial-williamsburg-virginia-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026E87E51,
title = {Duke of Gloucester Street, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-E87E51},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/duke-of-gloucester-street-colonial-williamsburg-virginia-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Duke of Gloucester Street, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-E87E51 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/duke-of-gloucester-street-colonial-williamsburg-virginia-1950s ER -
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