During the early morning of April 21, 1775, bored guards abandoned their posts at the Williamsburg Powder Magazine, where the town kept its ammunition.
Virginia Governor John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, was waiting for this opportunity.
He ordered his men to seize the gunpowder. Caught in the act, he told the angry townspeople that his men were taking their stores as a precaution against the threat of slave revolts. But really, Lord Dunmore feared the colonists, and they realized it.
“It was kind of a true pitchfork and torch moment for Williamsburg,” said Katherine Pittman, a researcher and historic interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg.
The Gunpowder Incident didn’t result in the Revolutionary War’s first shots, which were fired at Lexington and Concord in the Massachusetts Bay Colony just two days earlier. But April 21 was dubbed “the shot not heard around the world,” and the event pushed Virginia further towards war.
Now, 250 years later, Pittman and colleague, Kurt Smith, have written and directed special programming that begins Friday at Colonial Williamsburg. The typical daily programming focuses on the day after the event, but the weekend’s performances include 50 actors who will reenact the morning as it may have unfolded.
This anniversary coincides with the massive restorations at the Magazine and across Colonial Williamsburg. Matt Webster, the executive director of architectural preservation, said Williamsburg is “maybe the busiest it’s been since the 1950s in terms of restoration.”
The projects at the Magazine, the Capitol, the Williamsburg Bray School and the First Baptist Church are inspired by the emergence of new evidence and archeological excavations that continue to deepen the understanding of history.
For example, the Magazine’s outer wall was 10 feet high before the recent restoration. However, rediscovered accounts and a more complete understanding of the original foundation led researchers to believe that the wall was originally closer to 7 feet.
Webster said lowering the wall’s height is essential because the detail is significant. A difference of 3 feet changes how people interacted with and around the wall and how outsiders viewed the building.
Webster says the Magazine has lived many lives, as an armory, stable, market and church so it’s hard to tell what was originally designed and what was changed when.
“We’re very protective of those minute details,” Webster said, comparing the work to a book. If you take out chapters and alter paragraphs, how does that change the ending?” he said.
“Our job here is to put those words back into the story.”
These are the stories of the vast majority of the 18th-century populations, he said. And unlike the wealthy and influential minority, the common craftsmen, farmers or enslaved people who comprised half of Williamsburg’s population, “their story doesn’t survive in the written record; their story’s a fingerprint on a brick.”
Pittman and Smith agree that telling these stories is powerful and relevant today. And their programming around the Gunpowder Incident is a call to action for the audience: Let reason prevail.
“The only way that we’re going to improve as a country, as a society, is by studying our history,” Pittman said, “We just have a very exciting way of doing that.”
The 1775 Gunpowder Incident anniversary programming runs Friday through Monday each evening at 8:30. Events are free. Visit colonialwilliamsburg.org.
