Several years ago in arguing that the W&M Alumni House might be an  
antebellum structure, I cited an 1862 depiction of the town by Robert  
Knox Sneden;  I'm aware now of several errors I made in the article-- 
the major one being that I didn't  recognize, as a reader told me,  
that the house was surely at the time Italianate, with a distinctive  
tower on a flat roof.

	One of my guesses, also perhaps wrong, was that the tall, apparently  
wooden frame of some sort, just below and to the left of what is now  
the Alumni House (at the far right of the picture)

			http://alumni.wm.edu/magazine-archive/wint_0708/pdf/alumni_house.pdf

was a gallows.

	I've recently come across an account of antebellum Williamsburg that  
mentions an "entrance" to the city at roughly the place indicated by  
the "gallows" in Sneden's picture.  The account also seems to situate  
at that location a Saturday market where free and enslaved blacks  
offered farm wares.

	So....  can someone illuminate for me what an antebellum "entrance"  
to a town like Williamsburg would look like and what its function  
might have been?

	Many thanks.


------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-------------------------------------
Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William  
and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187 757-221-3932

http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/

http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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        Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....  
Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the  
college.
               --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."

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