By Emily Knoeppel

In early 1761, William Hunter, a trustee of Williamsburg’s Bray School, wrote to London to update the Bray Associates on the school’s first few months. He also wrote to recommend Mr. Robert Carter Nicholas as a trustee of the school, a position which Nicholas accepted. An active and patriotic Virginian and participant in Virginia’s various General Assemblies, Nicholas held this trustee position for nearly 13 of the school’s 14 years, outliving many of his fellow trustees and becoming near lead manager of the school’s affairs.

Every few months Nicholas would write to the Associates about developments and progress at the school. Most of the letters examined in the Bray School Lab were penned by Nicholas himself. These documents made up the bulk of records that I spent most of the Spring semester reviewing for the Lab. So much so that I came to regard Robert Carter Nicholas as a guide to the developments and inner workings of the Bray School.

Nicholas’ writings inducted me into the world of 1760s-1770s Williamsburg and its Bray School. The very first letter I examined was his letter to the Bray Associates in September 1761. He noted William Hunter’s death, William Yates’ willingness to join Nicholas in supporting the school, and—via reports from school mistress, Mrs. Ann Wager—the school’s progress relative to the year before. Subsequent letters I transcribed mostly followed the same pattern: a brief update on the school or its students, an aside about Mrs. Wager, the occasional update of the passing of a fellow trustee, and usually concluded with mention of funding, whether for an advancement or change to the school’s upkeep budget.

In September 1765, Nicholas described the struggle he faced finding another suitable and affordable building for the school and its pupils. This preceded the school’s removal from the initial building that is undergoing restoration today. The Bray School Lab has also been involved in studying this first building, which was both a school and a residence for Mrs. Wager.

Perhaps the most interesting and revealing of Nicholas’ letters to the Associates was one he wrote in December 1765, which discussed the school’s running in greater detail and included a list of students.   His letter notes thirty-four students in attendance at the time, all aged approximately between four and ten. He revealed that attendance was not mandatory, that the students attended when they could, and that Mrs. Wager willingly taught whoever arrived on that day.

Nicholas also noted that once the children were deemed old enough to begin work within their owners’ homes, they were often kept from school to complete those duties and were only occasionally able to return to the school. In this same letter, Nicholas briefly explained the curriculum and his hopes that children would be permitted to attend school for at least three years to properly learn and master the material. He also recorded that the children did not quite take to the rules he had proposed in 1762 as he had hoped.

Nicholas wrote of his own enslaved girl, Hannah, a Bray school student. He appeared encouraging of her education and progress, however, he also wrote of his disappointment when she appeared to be ‘a sad Jade’ despite his attempts at ‘reforming’ her.

Nicholas was key to my understanding of the Bray School and its history. Much of my insight into the school was guided through his letters, which revealed some of the inner workings of the school and its aims. Nicholas was very much – and perhaps unfortunately – a man of his time. A flawed man by modern standards yet a lenient man by contemporary standards, or at least in his own view. His letters paint a man with a fervor for and a dedication to the school and education of the enslaved children permitted to attend. I would like to believe that despite the racial constraints of the time and his innate prejudices, Nicholas truly believed in the small good he was doing and the potential for the difference education could make in the lives of those enslaved students.

My time at the lab was illuminating: a chance to explore a unique establishment that provided an education to enslaved children for over 14 years–one of the first instances in North American history–in a period where their basic rights and freedoms were denied. This was such a unique and rich experience that has helped me understand not only the past but the present, shining a light on a part of history that is unknown and largely ignored. By navigating the intricacies of the education of a minority of Williamsburg’s enslaved population in 1760s and 1770s and helping to bring this important history to the forefront of Williamsburg’s history and to the public, we can help expand the lens of history to include even those most marginalized.

Recently, I had the chance to speak at Sacramento State as a scholar and a museum professional. Although my work portraying Ann Wager is a career outside of my role at the Bray School Lab, these roles are interconnected. By making history feel immediate to a group of students who had never traveled outside the state of California, I was able to engage them better when I stepped “out-of-character” and spoke about the history of the Williamsburg Bray School. Suddenly, the remote past and our country’s legacy surrounding race, education, and religion felt immediate to these undergraduates. This is the power of finding ways to connect the past and present.

I introduced the students to Mrs. Wager in the spring of 1774, just a few months before her untimely death. Mrs. Wager’s legacy at the Bray School was long-standing by 1774, as was her experience with the school itself. The students were most compelled by Mrs. Wager’s seemingly inconsistent stance on encouraging Black education while also promoting the institution of slavery. Foreign to us in the 21st century, Ann’s divergent opinions on education and slavery were both common and controversial in colonial Virginia. On the one hand, the Bray School promoted education for enslaved and free Black children in an urban environment where much of the population was expected to be literate. On the other hand, Mrs. Wager was acutely aware (perhaps more than other members of the white community) that education which meant to indoctrinate could also empower students to achieve beyond such limitations.

I have extensively researched and portrayed Ann Wager at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for almost five years. The Foundation and the Lab work very closely as part of the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative. The idea behind this partnership is to collaborate on and share “research, scholarship and dialogue regarding the interconnected, often troubled, legacy of race, religion and education in Williamsburg and in America.” I am very much a part of both sides in this relationship, especially when it comes to Ann.

Mrs. Wager’s life is a series of fragmentary facts that are complicated by her fraught role as teacher at the Williamsburg Bray School. In the fourteen years that Ann Wager taught reading, spelling, sewing, etiquette, and religious doctrine to her students she never once openly challenged the institution of slavery. Indeed, she appears to have been in support of the Bray School’s pro-slavery stance. However, using the documents I have available on Mrs. Wager it appears that the school challenged her opinions on colonial education while also conforming to its rigid social demands.

The ways in which I connect past and present surrounding the various experiences of Ann Wager is just one way to bring the history of the Williamsburg Bray School to life. A central goal at William & Mary’s Bray School Lab is animating history in academic settings while also creating connections for the Williamsburg community at large. How we lab isn’t just about methodological approaches or historical documents: it’s about inspiring people to see the various ways that the Williamsburg Bray School speaks to the legacy of race, faith, and education in our world today. Connecting the past to the present is not merely an academic exercise. It is a call for social justice. By following the Bray School’s story into present-day, we can find ways to make meaning in our current world.

“I have lately visited the School here & examin’d the Children, who seem to have made a reasonable Progress[.]”

Robert Carter Nicholas to Rev. John Waring, December 27, 1765

Welcome to the inaugural edition of A Reasonable Progress, the blog of the W&M Bray School Lab. Part history, part reflection, part Lab report, A Reasonable Progress will be one of the various ways in which we share the work of the Bray School Lab with the public. The authors of blog posts will include Bray Lab staff, W&M student thought partners, Bray School descendants, W&M faculty, K-12 teachers, independent scholars, and others invested in the history of the Bray School and its students.

The Williamsburg Bray School opened its doors and welcomed its first class of young students on September 29, 1760. Founded by the London-based Anglican charity known as The Associates of Dr. Bray, the school educated Black children in the tenets of the Anglican faith and provided a basic, practical education. The Williamsburg Bray School operated for a total fourteen years, during which time the school’s only teacher, Mrs. Ann Wager, provided instruction to an estimated 300 to 400 students. We don’t yet know the names of those first boys and girls, but we do know that they were initially twenty-four in number and likely between three and ten years of age. Fortunately, there are surviving lists for three of the fourteen Bray School years.

The Bray School gave Black children new identities. Most of the children were enslaved, and some were free, but when they crossed the threshold of that 17’ by 33’ house-turned-school, they lives took on a new dimension. Bray School Trustee records refer to the children—like Doll, Aggy, Mary Anne, Aberdeen, John, and London—as scholars, and we cast them in that positive frame.We hope to capture the same energy and hope of possibility as we write about these students in the coming years.

The Reasonable Progress quote is taken from Robert Carter Nicholas’s 1765 report to the Bray Associates. A graduate of William & Mary, Nicholas was a practicing lawyer and esteemed member of the House of Burgesses. Nicholas was also a enslaver who sent at least two of the children he owned to the Bray School. Hannah, 7, appears on the 1762 student list and Sarah, no age given, appears on the 1769 list. The 1765 appraisal noted that the children were reading quite well and learning their prayers and catechism. Despite being one of the school’s staunchest supporters and administrators, Robert Carter Nicholas still seems to have had reservations about the lasting impact of the recommended three years of Bray School attendance and was afraid that the work of the school was being undone by the environments in which the children lived. The tensions between the students’ lived experiences inside and outside the Bray School are one of the many subjects we plan to tease out here.

As the blog of the W&M Bray School Lab, A Reasonable Progress will chronicle the history of the Williamsburg Bray School, its purpose, and its curriculum. We will delve deeply into the lived experiences of Bray School students, the ways in which they made spaces for agency, and their connections to Williamsburg today. The blog will also highlight Lab processes and show you how we lab in creating a digital, public-facing research archive. Finally, we invite you to join us as thought partners and writers, creating content for a broad audience that is both academic and non-academic, local and international.  

We are waiting to hear from you at braylab@wm.edu.

Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee
Director, W&M Bray School Lab
Mellon Engagement Coordinator for African American Heritage