Evening, we continue with David Rockefeller's Memoirs, very interesting about the Rockefeller Center.

..The next morning we climbed into the car for the trip to Richmond, where Father was to meet with Governor Harry F. Byrd to discuss conservation work in the Shenandoah Valley. Father had decided earlier that he wanted to stop in Williamsburg, home of the College of William and Mary, to see the work that was being done to renovate the national memorial hall of Phi Beta Kappa, the first chapter of which was located on the college campus. Father had been elected to this national honorary fraternity when he was an undergraduate at Brown and had agreed to lead the fund-raising campaign for the building. Our guide for this brief portion of the trip was to be the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church and a part-time development officer for the college.

Dr. Goodwin met us on the road into town early in the morning of a glorious spring day, with the dogwood and azalea in full bloom. He showed us the memorial hall and then led us around the sleepy village that had been the capital of Virginia before the American Revolution. But after the Revolution, when the capital moved to Richmond, the town entered a long period of slow decline. Many of its splendid public buildings, including the Governor’s Palace and the House of Burgesses, had literally fallen into ruins. Dr. Goodwin was an eloquent tour director and a very good salesman. When we visited a handsome but dilapidated T brick building known as the George Wythe House, he extolled its fine architecture but pointed out with sadness its state of disrepair. Father picked up on the observation and later agreed to provide the funds needed to restore the house.

That was the modest beginning of Father’s most significant project in historic restoration, a project that gave him as much pleasure as anything he did in the field of philanthropy during his lifetime. Over a period of more than thirty years he spent some $60 million in acquiring and restoring the central portion of the town to its authentic colonial condition. Today Williamsburg is a pilgrimage site for millions of Americans and a place to which presidents of the United States have proudly taken visiting heads of state to catch a glimpse of an earlier America and its customs and traditions.*
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/08/part-2-memoirs-david-rockefeller.html