In 1926, Williamsburg was a quiet southern college town whose storied past had been largely forgotten. It hadn’t been Virginia’s capital city for 150 years and the modern world crept in slowly, with gas stations and soda fountains bumping up against old colonial buildings.
It was, in the words of one writer, a certain “R.G.,” “pleasingly decayed,” “a Highway Town in which the Ancient and the Modern were mingled in an Effect of peculiar Aggravation.”…