The three of us walked down Williamsburg’s main street, affectionately known as Dog Street to the students and locals, and Duke of Gloucester Street to everyone else. Bruton Parish was a few blocks away on the edge of the commercial district and the beginning of the restored eighteenth-century village.

Williamsburg at Christmastime is a magical place. The highlight of the season is the Grand Illumination, an evening in early December that ends with spectacular fireworks and features a torch-lit parade of the Fife and Drums down Dog Street, Christmas music and readings on the Palace Green, and, most famously, more than two thousand five hundred handmade wreaths, swags, and garlands made from pine boughs, magnolia leaves, dried rushes, vines, or feathers and decorated with pinecones, clove-studded oranges, pineapples, berries, dried fruit, flowers, cinnamon sticks, and ribbons. If you could attach it to a wreath and it was faithful to the colonial era, it was probably hanging on a wall, door, window, column, or fence.

We had just missed the Grand Illumination by three days.

“Were you here on Monday?” I asked Josie.

She shook her head. “I was at a vineyard in Orange.”

“What happened on Monday?” Quinn asked.

“The Grand Illumination,” I said. “We’ll come here one year so you can see it.”

We crossed Nassau Street and left the commercial district behind. “So is this place the Disney version of Colonial America?” Quinn asked as a woman wearing a long skirt, a heavy cape, and a bonnet walked past us.

Josie and I exchanged glances.

“No,” I said. “A lot of these buildings were actually here in the 1700s.”

“It’s a historic restoration, not a theme park,” Josie said. “In the 1920s, the rector of Bruton Parish Church—a man named W.A.R. Goodwin—convinced John D. Rockefeller that Williamsburg was an important colonial town that ought to be saved. The story goes that after Goodwin talked to Rockefeller, Rockefeller took a midnight stroll by himself and when he returned, he agreed to take on the project.”

“The rector of the church we’re going to visit?” Quinn asked.

“That’s right,” she said.

“I read that one of the reasons John D. Rockefeller took on restoring Williamsburg was to keep the documents in Bruton Vault from ever falling into the wrong hands because they were so controversial,” I said.

Josie gave me a stern look. “Look, for years Goodwin tried to find a wealthy patron to buy Williamsburg. He started with Henry Ford and then worked on other members of the Ford family after Henry turned him down. He got an “absolutely not” letter from Henry’s brother that included a Detroit newspaper article headline: ‘Henry Ford Asked to Buy Ancient Virginia Town.’ So, I’m sorry, Lucie, but I can’t go along with your Rockefeller conspiracy theory. It was a stroke of luck that the Rockefellers happened to visit Williamsburg and Goodwin got a chance to talk to John D.”