The "Accurate-ish" Era of Colonial Williamsburg

American History meets American Capitalism

I have never received as much feedback on an article as I have over the last few days about my recent Colonial Williamsburg article in Politico Magazine, and never as overwhelmingly positive either. I’ve heard from former employees, longtime visitors, and people who went 30 years ago and are thinking about returning now.

The article sat at the top of Politico’s most-read list all weekend. My editor remarked that he’s rarely seen people quote the last line from a piece so often on social media: this indicates people are reading this quite long article to the end. The editors at Politico did a great job streamlining this article, and I’m grateful to all of them.

In the course of that streamlining, though, a rather large section of Colonial Williamsburg’s history got condensed into three paragraphs: Mitchell Reiss’ tenure as the museum’s CEO from 2014 to 2019. This is the guy who destroyed the museum’s research and training departments, leaving the museum’s interpreters without any kind of academic mentorship or fact checking.

But that story, like most stories, is more complicated than that, and its ramifications go beyond Colonial Williamsburg itself. This is a story of what happens when an American history museum collides with American capitalism. Many such cases, as it turns out.

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“Accurate-Ish”: The Mitchell Reiss Years

The zombie pirates moaned and clanked as they shambled away from the Capitol building, where Patrick Henry once railed against the Stamp Act. They groaned their way past Raleigh Tavern, where Thomas Jefferson and George Washington plotted sedition in response to British tyranny. An enormous, bearded man with a cutlass and a tankard shouted at trick-or-treaters as his undead marauders shuffled and stumbled their way to Chowning’s Tavern. The date was October 31^st, 2015, the event was “Under Blackbeard’s Flag,” and the dread pirate had returned from the underworld with his pirate band to exact revenge on Colonial Williamsburg for executing members of his crew.

Never mind that Blackbeard died in 1718 — half a century before Colonial Williamsburg’s historical focus. Never mind that Blackbeard died in battle or that, while members of Blackbeard’s crew faced trial in Williamsburg, they were almost certainly hanged miles away in Hampton. Ten thousand people attended the Halloween event, Colonial Williamsburg CEO Mitchell Reiss told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and that was good enough for him. “The Blackbeard story was fun, it was accurate-ish. But you know, it got people here and they had a great time.”

“It’s easy to armchair everything, but I think that he didn’t really see another way to right this financial situation,” Beth Kelly, vice president of Research, Training and Program Design, told me when I called to ask about Mitchell specifically. “And maybe [he] didn’t see the foundation for what it truly was intended to be, which was an educational institution rather than a business. It’s a very complicated business, as I’m sure you figured out when you were here.”

As a private nonprofit, Colonial Williamsburg receives no state or federal funding; it has always been dependent on the kindness of strangers. The first and kindest of these strangers, John D. Rockefeller Jr, sponsored the museum’s creation and established a substantial endowment to keep it going after his death. But the endowment was not large enough to last forever, so the son of one of history’s most powerful capitalists crafted a capitalist solution: a for-profit subsidiary, which would run hotels and attractions for guests to generate funds for the museum, which would in turn attract more guests for the hotels and attractions. As long as capitalism’s baseline assumption of infinite expansion held true, everything would work out fine.

Colonial Williamsburg’s attendance peaked at 1.2 million in the mid 1980s, then slowly declined to just under a million in 1999. Ticket sales decreased dramatically in the wake of September 11th, and then the Great Recession sent admissions spiraling even farther. By 2016, ticket sales had dropped to 560,000 — a 50 percent decrease in 30 years. Fewer museum visitors meant fewer hotel guests. Colonial Williamsburg’s for-profit division has run at a deficit since at least 2012—one well-placed source tells me it was never in the black. To make up the shortfall, the organization drew heavily from its endowment and took out over $300 million in loans, which cost upwards of $19 million in interest each year. If things continued this way, the museum would run out of money by 2026. The organization would increase revenue, cut costs, or perish.

In 2014, the Board of Trustees appointed Mitchell Reiss, a longtime diplomat, former President of Washington College and former government professor at William & Mary, as CEO, where he discovered the financial mess and gave himself a single, all-encompassing mission: Make Williamsburg Viable Again. Make it vibrant. Make it modern.

Reiss immediately did what any smart businessman would do: He began modernization initiatives and moved to scrap any department not actively turning a profit. This approach made sense for the ostensibly for-profit sector, which had never worked the way Rockefeller intended, but not necessarily for the museum itself, which was never supposed to generate a profit.

“Colonial Williamsburg had set itself up in the ’70s, or really maybe in the ’60s, to be a premier research institution,” Dr. Susan Kern told me. Kern, who specializes in early American history and the way museums present that history today, worked closely with Colonial Williamsburg’s academic research wing for nearly 20 years, until she departed for the University of Maryland in 2021. Colonial Williamsburg’s research department employed multiple PhD historians who regularly published peer reviewed papers in academic journals. These scholars worked to ensure that the museum’s programming remained cutting-edge and accurate.

“[Reiss] felt that we were at a point … that we had done all the research that we needed to do,” Kelly told me. “And I think he was — rightfully so — just worried about trying to make sure that the future would be here for Colonial Williamsburg. So he did eliminate the historian positions [and] the training positions.”

When Reiss took over, Colonial Williamsburg had a Department of Publication and Learning Ventures that had earned 16 Emmys, mostly local, for their educational video field trip programming. “Granted, they didn’t generate money, but that wasn’t the purpose,” Kelly told me. Reiss scrapped that department too.

“He just started eliminating positions and whole divisions regardless of their role in the museum,” Kern told me. “He seemed to have no understanding of what historical research was, how museum interpretation worked — it felt completely arbitrary to anybody who has studied these institutions.”

Sharon Dorsey, who worked her way from typist to Executive Director of Human Resources over her 50 years with the company, has a different perspective. “In hindsight, I think maybe that wasn't the best decision, but I don't think it was all Mitchell's decision,” she told me. She recalls sitting in on round table meetings with 20 or 30 senior members and department leaders, all debating how best to save the company. “Walking into that situation, people weren't going to like you,” Dorsey said. “I don't think there's any way [Reiss] could have dodged that bullet.”

Reiss also angered purists with his dramatically different vision for Colonial Williamsburg: less Ken Burns, more Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton explicitly inspired many of the institute’s changes, including programming that featured gender-swapped House of Burgess members. Reiss and his chief marketing officer, Michael Holtzman, encouraged these academically-untethered (and, moving forward, untrained) interpreters to create programming based on independent research, and brainstormed ideas to attract a new audience. Some “accurate-ish” ideas went too far even for the new administration — a proposal for revolutionary laser tag was considered but shot down. Others, like an “Escape the King” escape room (which required knowledge of revolutionary war trivia), went through.

In many ways, the change was explicitly designed to sacrifice historical accuracy for entertainment value. But it also made room for programming based on oral histories rather than written records, something Colonial Williamsburg had resisted for decades. Because very few primary written sources by and about enslaved people exist, the change allowed for more Black history programming based on narratives passed down for generations, albeit largely unchecked by scholars of oral history. The approach led to one of Colonial Williamsburg’s current initiatives: the restoration of First Baptist Church, founded in 1776 in defiance of laws that forbade gatherings of enslaved people. In the 1950s, Colonial Williamsburg purchased, demolished, and replaced the church with a parking lot. The congregation relocated, but the earth held onto its legacy; Archaeologists have discovered several graves on church property. Colonial Williamsburg is working with community members to reconstruct the church, tell the story of one of the oldest extant Black congregations in America, and show proper respect to these remains. The museum also restored the church’s Freedom Bell, which Obama rang at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (If you recall Rex Ellis, founder of the Colonial Williamsburg interpretation program back in the late 70s: he designed that museum).

Reiss addressed race issues within the administration as well. He diversified both the board and the C-suite, hired a DEI officer, and expunged racist artifacts from museum facilities. One former employee recalls Reiss personally expelling a guest from a Colonial Williamsburg hotel after the guest made racist remarks.

But the Reiss-era renovations did not stop with this kind of long-overdue housecleaning. While stripping the academic side of the organization for parts, the administration allocated $2 million to modernizing one of Colonial Williamsburg’s three golf courses, hundreds of thousands for a targeted 30-second Superbowl ad, and $8 million for renovations to the Williamsburg Inn. He acquired two Briard puppies, Liberty and Justice, to serve as mascots and merchandising gold mines, and sent George Washington to the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries to promote voter registration. Reiss also invested in company leadership; he gave himself a $100,000 bonus in both 2017 and 2018, which brought his total compensation package to over $800,000.

In 2019, after just five years as CEO, Reiss and Colonial Williamsburg abruptly parted ways. Costs were way down, but so was revenue. The foundation was a shell of its former self. “He completely gutted all of Colonial Williamsburg’s standing as a research institution, other than curatorial,” Kern told me.

In January of 2020, the board of trustees hired Cliff Fleet, a former Phillip Morris executive, weeks before the world slammed head-first into a different kind of history. For the foundation, however, Covid provided an opportunity for a hard reset. Fleet set aside $163 million for programming and research, and Colonial Williamsburg began bootstrapping itself back into the digital production world. “We were using cell phones because the cameras had been sold,” Kelly told me. “But the loyal supporters were so eager to see something that was familiar to them.”

The Fleet administration has taken steps towards restoring Colonial Williamsburg’s academic capabilities. They have merged the remnants of their history and training programs into a single Research, Training and Program Design division, which Kelly now manages. The program currently has three historians: one who previously worked at Colonial Williamsburg and two new hires. “It takes a while to get some of these historians up to speed on those microhistories,” Kelly told me.

Even when they find their feet, however, the history department will look very different than it did in the pre-Reiss era. The reconstituted research department mostly contains people with graduate degrees, not PhD-level historians, and the people leading those divisions largely have administrative experience rather than academic credentials. Museum staff seems stretched very thin. Nicole Brown, who interprets Ann Wager and has a pivotal leadership role within the Bray School initiative, also manages all programming for the museum while simultaneously working towards her PhD at William & Mary’s American Studies department: an enormous workload to place on anyone, never mind someone who is still learning.

 Ultimately, Kern told me, all the financial problems that inspired cuts to the academic departments in the first place still exist. “It's going to take big money [to rebuild],” she told me. Though Colonial Williamsburg has broken fundraising records over the last two years, that money simply is not there — at least, not yet. And they’re not alone. A lot of history museums are going through the same thing, and no one has found a good answer yet. As Kern put it: “Williamsburg is just the 8,000 pound canary.”

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