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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------- 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." ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html