Colonial Williamsburg is a sketcher’s paradise, especially if you love to sketch architecture.

Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia, preceded by the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and followed by Richmond (which moved from Williamsburg at the time of the Revolutionary War to be further away from the coast). The capital of Virginia remains in Richmond today.

Colonial Williamsburg represents the capital in the years leading up to the break with Britain. It is billed as the “world’s largest U. S. history museum.”

Many of the current buildings have been restored or even reconstructed to appear as they did in the years before the American Revolution.

Along Williamsburg’s streets are historical reenactors who portray people of the time. Which reminds me of California’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire (a reenactment of Elizabethan England).

You can enter many of the buildings and are met by period interpreters who talk about the life and times of the people of Williamsburg.

One of these building I toured was the home of Peyton Randolph (featured sketch), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was the first president of the First Continental Congress. Randolph was a very wealthy and influential man. He died in 1775, a year before America’s monumental year. Some historians have theorized that, had he lived, he would have been our Nation’s first president.

It took 27 slaves to tend to the house and part of the tour focused on the slave quarters.

In most cases, slaves slept where they worked. So if you were a cook, you slept in the kitchen. If you where a personal servant to the lord of the house, you slept on a straw stuffed mattress which resembles a large dog bed placed at the foot or the side of their master’s bed.

Another building that I toured and sketched was the Capitol Building. It was in this two chambered government building that representatives from the colonies meet with the British government sowing the seeds of our own independence.