Who lived here?
During the Middle Plantation period, prior to the founding of Williamsburg in 1699, John Page owned this land, but we are not sure if anyone was resident on this property at that time. Previous excavations here uncovered a seventeenth-century boundary ditch and roof tiles from John Page’s kiln (dating to the 1660s), suggesting that the site may indeed have been occupied at that early date. Historical documents have given us a long list of people who have lived here since. The earliest of these was a man named Christopher Jackson, a surveyor, who bought the two colonial lots that make up the Ravenscroft site in 1713 after Williamsburg was partitioned into half-acre parcels of land. An ordinary-keeper named Robert Wills owned the property in the 1730s. Though we previously believed that Wills did not operate his ordinary (or tavern) on this site, we are now reevaluating that possibility, and searching the documentary record for evidence that a tavern did exist here. At several points in
