A new piece of Colonial Williamsburg history has been discovered recently, just not from the time period you might expect.
On May 22, Blake Patterson posted on his blog Nostalgic Virginian about a 1938 eight-millimeter film that was discovered in a storage locker.
The film, acquired by Dallas Moore who runs the website Forgotten Now Found, shows scenes clipped together from a longer film reel of a christening at Bruton Parish Church, Patterson said.
Moore said he bought a group of 14 videos from a picker in the Washington, D.C. area who had found them in a storage locker. He is still currently cataloging all of the videos and has not yet found anything else in relation to Colonial Williamsburg, but the discovery of this short clip makes the history buff in him excited
“These old home movies hold a lot of history,” he said. “I like that every time I put a new reel on my machine I am seeing something that no one else has seen in sometimes 70 to 80 years.”
Moore said he only cut off about 15 seconds worth of footage where the film was too dark to see, but throughout the three-minute clip there are scenes of recognizable locations in Colonial Williamsburg as well as a couple holding a baby with friends watching.
There isn’t a confirmation on the identity of the individuals in the film, but Moore said the box in which he found the 14 films was labeled “Lt. GH Crawford.”
Upon further research, he said Crawford was known to be in the Navy and was stationed in the Philippines in the 1930s.
“For me this clip is just a small glimpse into this man’s life, he was a Navy man and served in an interesting time frame of between the two world wars,” Moore said. “My favorite clip from this group of films shows the Asiatic Fleet off the coast of the Philippines, you can see old bi-planes on the decks of the navy ships. It really is amazing to see it from the point of view of a single person, the man who made these films.”
The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg began in 1927 and continues today, according to the organization’s website. In the video, parts of the Governor’s Palace, the Capitol, the Magazine, the Courthouse and Bruton Parish Church can be recognized.
Patterson said the video shows an interesting time between restoration and completion, especially for the Governor’s Palace which had only been restored less than five years prior to the filming on the clip.
“It was taken at a time sort of ironic when the renovation of Colonial Williamsburg was partially completely but still underway,” Patterson said. “So you’re seeing behind the scenes of what is to come of the fully restored Colonial Williamsburg.”
While many historians are interested in the colonial era of Williamsburg, Patterson said little patches of film such as this one share the piece of a greater picture that is the entire history of Colonial Williamsburg, including the site’s reconstruction.
“It’s interesting, I think, the way people change their notion of what’s important to leave ‘as is’ and what’s important to restore,” he said. “It’s interesting to think about what becomes important to people at certain times in history.”
To view the full clip as well as others in the collection, visit Forgotten Now Found online.
Colonial Williamsburg did not immediately respond for comment.
