By Julia Haws
For the past three years, I have been working with other Student Thought Partners at the William & Mary Bray School Lab to transcribe Virginia Gazette records regarding households affiliated with the Williamsburg Bray School. When we started this project in 2022, our goal was to find and transcribe every mention of a Bray School household in a Gazette from 1760 to 1774, the years of the school’s operation. So far, we have transcribed 649 articles relating to thirty households.
We began this project hoping to provide a foundation for future genealogical research and to contextualize the lives of Bray School scholars. The Gazette was one of the main ways that information about major events in and beyond Williamsburg spread through the city, and so they give us a window into the conversations and controversies which occurred outside the school. Despite Gazette printer Clementina Rind’s declaration that her paper was “Open to ALL PARTIES, but influenced by NONE,” access to the Gazette was not equal. Enslaved people—including a man named Dick, enslaved by Rind—likely participated in paper’s publication, but it was primarily white Virginians who were able to publish notices and opinions. For this reason, our transcriptions primarily relate to the white men and women who enslaved Bray School scholars.
Although the articles were written by and for white readers, we can broaden our reading of them by understanding our scholars and their enslavers as part of a network of information and shared spaces in 18th-century Williamsburg. Reading the Gazette in this context, we can draw on recent calls to shift the narrative of archival silences by reading “against the bias grain” to see those made invisible by the systems of power which governed record production. In his 1984 examination of architecture and racial boundaries on plantations, Dell Upton concluded that the Black and white landscapes “must be read as a whole.” This suggestion has been particularly useful for me in understanding how the news recorded and shaped by the Gazette affected all Williamsburg residents, not only those whose names it recorded.
Taking this broad approach to the Gazette, we have uncovered a range of interesting and unexpected stories. In 1768, we learn that the Rev. James Horrocks, minister of Bruton Parish Church and President of William & Mary, had been appointed commissary of the Bishop of London. This post placed the already powerful man in charge of Virginia’s Anglican churches. In the 18th century, the Anglicanism was Virginia’s official religion, so this role allowed Horrocks oversight of the religious lives of every Virginian.
Rev. Horrocks was not the only person affected by his new job. Everyone in his household would have known of and been impacted by his promotion, including Charlotte, a young girl whom he enslaved and who appears on the 1769 Bray School student list. Did Horrocks send her to the school, which was funded by a prominent Anglican charity, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Church of England? Charlotte was not, after all, the only child that he enslaved, but she is the only one known to have attended the Bray School. As she walked to school, she might have met Adam and Fanny, two scholars enslaved by William & Mary, who also appear on the 1769 student list. Was Horrocks involved in the decision to send them to the Bray School? How did the three of them relate their own educational experiences to the mission of the College, an institution supported by their labor?
As part of her lessons at the Bray School, Charlotte might have become familiar with the governing structure of the Church of England, and therefore would have had a solid foundation to understand the controversy which her enslaver soon became involved in. Rev. Horrocks was among a small number of Virginia clergy who ardently supported establishing bishops for the American colonies, a proposal which would have radically changed the experience of religion in the colonies, where churches that had historically enjoyed a measure of freedom and autonomy would come under the direct supervision of a bishop who was no longer an ocean away.
Rev. Horrocks left Virginia nearly a year before his 1772 death, but notices about his estate’s dispersal provide hints as to how Charlotte’s life in his household and her experiences at the Bray School might have interacted. In August 1772, an advertisement for “a Variety of valuable Books” belonging to the recently deceased commissary appeared in the Gazette. Did Charlotte ever have the opportunity to read these books? If so, what were the conditions under which she was allowed access to them? If not, what was it like to live in constant proximity to interesting and rare books, unable, despite her newly acquired literacy, to explore the stories contained within them?

Whatever her experience in the Horrocks’ household, it is certain that Charlotte’s life was disrupted in 1772, when news of her enslaver’s death reached the colony. Letters from Rev. Horrocks’ father-in-law Thomas Everard report that the people the Horrocks’ enslaved were “very unwilling to part with their Mistress,” and hoped that Mrs. Horrocks might come to an arrangement with her brother-in-law, Rev. Horrocks’ heir, allowing her to retain legal ownership of half the people enslaved by her husband, rather than the third she was legally entitled to. After more than a year of uncertainty, it seems that at least some of those enslaved by the Horrocks were sold. It is unclear if Charlotte was among them. If she remained with Mrs. Horrocks, who returned to Virginia after her husband’s death, then it is possible she was able to continue her education during the school’s final months.
The records of the Horrocks’ household, like most records in the Gazette, provoke more questions than they provide answers. The many stories hinted at in the Gazette’s pages invite our imagination to fill in details to enrich understanding of how the children might have bridged their experiences within and without the school’s walls. What the Virginia Gazette project provides, ultimately, is an invitation to imagine the Bray School scholars as part of the vibrant and rapidly changing landscape of 18th-century Williamsburg, a world whose breaking news informs conversations today nearly as much as it did 250 years ago.

Julia Haws is a senior studying History and Religious Studies at William and Mary. She joined the Bray School Lab as a student thought partner in 2022, and has worked on transcriptions of the Virginia Gazette and, during an internship with the Colonial Williamsburg Milliners, on a theorized reconstruction of a Bray School Student’s uniform.