The notice below is to appear in the spring issue of Colonial
Williamsburg, the journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. It is
posted in advance here in hopes of bringing early to the problem the
research skills of the list.

Questions are best addressed off-list to [log in to unmask]

Best regards,
Dennis Montgomery
Editor
Colonial Williamsburg

    In an early draft of his history of what came to be Colonial
    Williamsburg, the Reverend Doctor W.A.R. Goodwin, the Bruton Parish
    priest who persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr., to finance the
    restoration of the eighteenth-century city, wrote:

        In 1881 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad arrived in
        Williamsburg. Eager to help pay for itself by transporting the
        crowds which were converging upon Yorktown to take part in the
        Yorktown Centennial celebration of the Surrender, the railroad
        presumptuously ran itself down the middle of the Duke of
        Gloucester Street, over the site of the ancient Capitol, and
        went on its way to Yorktown, its desired temporary destination.

    That was 125 years ago. Colonial Williamsburg, the journal of the
    Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has for the past seven years been
    on the hunt of a photograph of the railroad tracks on the Duke of
    Gloucester Street. Other foundation departments have searched years
    more. So far, no luck.

    The C & O spur seems to have been the idea of Collis P. Huntington,
    the California railroad and Newport News shipbuilding tycoon. Its
    construction, if tradition may be credited, resulted in the removal
    of the last above-ground vestiges of the Virginia Capitol begun in
    1751. By 1897, the Capitol site belonged to the Old Dominion Land
    Company, a Chesapeake and Ohio subsidiary, which that year deeded it
    to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The
    Reverend Doctor Goodwin negotiated Rockefeller-restoration rights to
    the site from the A.P.V.A. in 1927.

    Colonial Williamsburg, proposes now to enlist in its quest for such
    a photo the assistance of its best and biggest asset, its readers.
    The magazine offers to pay $200 to any individual who has rights to,
    and first provides for publication in the magazine, an 1881
    photograph, to be returned undamaged after copying, of railroad
    tracks on the Duke of Gloucester Street. Otherwise, it will pay $200
    to any individual who can for the magazine certainly identify such a
    photo--as opposed to suggest a search for--in the collection of any
    historical institution, if it includes that institution's
    identification nomenclature. (It matters not to the magazine if the
    person works for that institution, but in such cases the journal
    requires that individuals clear with supervisors
    conflict-of-interest issues.) In either case, the magazine will pay
    an additional $100 for each different 1881 photograph of railroad
    tracks on Duke of Gloucester Street to a limit of $500.

    Submissions should be made to:

    Production Specialist David Gouge
    The Colonial Williamsburg Journal
    Post Office Box 1776
    Williamsburg, Virginia     23187

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