Indigenous faces were a familiar sight in early Williamsburg. Native peoples came into the town to trade and conduct diplomacy. Some also lived in Williamsburg while attending the Brafferton Indian School. Today, the Brafferton Building is an administrative building for William & Mary, closed to the public. While you cannot visit it in the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area, it is one of the town’s most fascinating historic sites.
Before European colonization, a vast number of Native people populated the land we think of as Virginia. Speaking a variety of Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquoian languages, they organized themselves into nations, chiefdoms, and tribes according to kinship networks and political alliances. English migrants brought disease, warfare, and practices of enslavement that caused Indigenous populations to decline.1 The colonists also carried into the continent the belief that they could spread English culture and Christianity among those Natives who “live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.”2
Many influential Englishmen supported this mission. When the renowned scientist Robert Boyle died in 1691, he left a considerable fortune behind for “pious and charitable uses.” 3 To that end, the trustees of his estate purchased a large farm in Yorkshire known as Brafferton Manor. They used its profits to fund missionary efforts in British North America. With this money, Virginia’s leaders opened a school for Native children alongside William & Mary, which became known as the Brafferton School. They hoped that the school would enable Indigenous students to “read, write & all other arts & sciences, that the best Englishmen’s sons do learn,” and allow them to “know their great Almighty God.” 4 Most of all, they hoped these students would return to their people as missionaries to spread the gospel.
After decades of violence, though, local Native people were reluctant to deliver their children to the care of the English. Unable to convince tributary tribes to send students voluntarily, Virginians purchased four American Indian children from the Catawba, who may have been war captives from a different tribe, and brought them to the school.5 But circumstances changed with the outbreak of war in 1711. After the Tuscarora and their allies went to war with English settlers in North Carolina, Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood visited some of the neutral factions among the Tuscarora, as well as other neighboring Indians, to make a proposition. With his militia behind him, he suggested that each tribe send two children to the school as “hostages” in exchange for Virginia’s friendship. As a token of that friendship, Virginia would allow them to skip their yearly tribute payments of twenty beaver pelts.6
Though trust ran thin, a mix of incentives and coercion pushed some Indian leaders to send their children to the Brafferton School. By 1711, the Chickahominy, Meherrin, Nansemond, Nottoway, and Pamunkey nations sent a total of ten students to the Brafferton school. The next year, there were twenty-four students. This was likely the Brafferton School’s busiest period. With funding stretched, according to an account by a William & Mary professor named Hugh Jones, an “abundance of them used to die, either thro’ Sickness, change of Provision, and way of Life; or as some will have it, often for want of proper Necessaries and due Care taken with them.” 7 In later years, financial difficulties and changing diplomatic conditions caused the number of students to plummet. Indeed, a lull in Native enrollment in the early 1720s allowed funds from the Boyle estate to accumulate. This provided the college with the means to build a new structure for housing and educating Indian students. The impressive three-story building known as Brafferton Hall was finished in 1723. 8 In the following years, the number of Indian scholars hovered in the single digits. 9
The Brafferton School’s Indian scholars learned to read and write in English from the Bible and the Anglican catechism. They would have spent time with William & Mary’s white students at daily mealtimes and at weekly chapel visits. Because the College’s enrollments were small, they made up a significant part of the student body. Dressed in English clothes, but likely retaining traditional hairstyles and adornments, they would have been a prominent presence in the town of Williamsburg. Usually arriving around the age of seven or eight, the Indian scholars stayed at the school for two to four years. Some left early, as was the case with two unnamed Cherokee students who, according to Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie, could “not be reconcil’d to their Books” and “went away of their own accord [without] leave.”10
Some white Virginians felt that the school was a failure. According to Virginia planter William Byrd II, those who completed their education at the school immediately relapsed “into Infidelity and Barbarism” because they “forget all the good they learn, and remember the Ill.”11
Some Indigenous leaders likewise questioned the school’s usefulness. Benjamin Franklin once described a 1744 treaty negotiation in which the English offered to take some of the Native children to the Brafferton School. The Native diplomats’ reply, according to Franklin, was that “some of their Youths had formerly been educated in that College,” but when they returned, “they were absolutely good for nothing being neither acquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catching Beaver or surprizing an enemy.” They concluded by offering to take some of the English children to “make men of them.”12 Franklin’s account isn’t entirely trustworthy. He was writing many years after the fact about an event he didn’t witness, and he could seldom resist adding a touch of color his stories. But regardless of whether this unfolded as Franklin described, the students’ experiences in Williamsburg set them apart from their peers.
Education at the Brafferton enabled students to serve as military leaders, diplomats, and translators. Many of the young scholars belonged to prominent families. Their schooling helped them to prepare for leadership roles. They returned home with new language skills and knowledge about English customs, culture, and society that guided their peoples through the tumult of colonization and revolution. When violence broke out between the Cherokee and Virginians in the 1770s, former student Charles Murphy was often called upon as an interpreter and messenger. A Delaware-Oneida man named John Montour used the knowledge he developed at the Brafferton School to cultivate alliances between Ohio Valley Indians and both the British and Americans during the Revolutionary War. Former student John Nettles fought for the Americans during the Revolutionary War and served a translator and diplomat for the Catawba for decades, including in meetings with President George Washington.13
The American Revolution ultimately brought an end to the Brafferton School. As Great Britain cut off economic ties with the rebellious Americans, funding for the school evaporated. The last known student, Henry Bawbee, left the school in 1778. Over the course of its existence, about 125 Indian boys attended the school, though surviving documents only disclose the names of 27 students. At least 39 descendant communities have ancestors who attended the Brafferton School.14
Unfortunately, little written documentation exists about the Brafferton students’ lives while at school. Much of what we know about the school comes from Virginia’s white leaders, rather than from the students. Yet recent archaeological work has offered some tantalizing clues about student lives. In 2011 and 2012, William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg excavated the Brafferton Building’s exterior and cellar. This work uncovered glass beads and copper, which may have been used for ornamentation. Even more intriguing was a collection of chipped stone and glass tools that resemble Indigenous artifacts found elsewhere. These findings suggest that Brafferton students adapted traditional toolmaking practices to European materials. 15 The Brafferton School aimed to introduce its students to English culture. But behind closed doors, this evidence suggests that their Native cultures persisted, and may have even thrived. 16
The Brafferton School was not the first Indian school in North America, and it was not the last. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hundreds of Indian boarding schools spread across the nation. While the Brafferton and other colonial-era Indian schools taught English and Christianity to their students, later boarding schools aimed to sever students’ connection to their culture, language, families, and communities. Today, remaining as one of the oldest standing structures in Virginia, the Brafferton School is a monument to the flawed ambition of English colonization and the resilience of Native cultures and nations, many of which continue to live in Virginia today.
An Educational Experiment
The Brafferton Indian School’s goals of introducing English culture and religion met resistance
FAQs with our American Indian Interpreters
Here’s just a small sampling of the top five most asked questions we receive from guests.
A Routine Day in Williamsburg
Encampment gives American Indians the more visible role they played in the 18th century
Presentation: Two-Spirits in American Indian Life
Join a member of our American Indian Initiative as they explore the lives of two-spirit indigenous people who embody both female and male spirits.
CW Admission
Presentation: The Shawnee and Dunmore at War, 1774
Discover how Indigenous alliances, the Proclamation of 1763, and settlers’ quest for land contributed to the 1774 Shawnee-Dunmore War and why choosing a winner isn't always clear.
Art Museums Admission
Presentation: Midwinter Stories
Celebrate American Indian life and culture through stories and traditions.
CW Admission
