Mass meetings demanding that Williamsburg’s city government spend more? Unionized workers striking? Bruton Parish’s rector and William and Mary’s president quarreling over racial equality? All this and more are to be found in Swem Library’s exhibit, “A ‘Most Thriving and Growing Place’: Williamsburg before the Restoration.” Focusing on the years from the 1880s to the 1920s, the exhibit uses documents, images, and artifacts from Swem’s Special Collections Research Center to examine how a sleepy southern college town became a progressive, expansive city in the Jim Crow South.

In September 1918, the first class of women enrolled at the College of William and Mary making it the first state-supported four-year college in Virginia to admit women.

In honor of the College of William and Mary's annual Charter Day Ceremony on February 7, 2009, an exhibit case of material was available for viewing near the entrance to Swem Library. Items on display included the first page of the 1693 Charter granted to the College by King William III and Queen Mary II reproduced from the Charter in Swem Library, items from the Charter Day ceremonies featuring Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and U.S. President and William and Mary Chancellor John Tyler, and information about Charter Day speaker Sen. Jim Webb, and honorary degree recipients director of the Museum of Modern Art Glenn Lowry and author and historian John Hope Franklin.

Using programs, posters, photographs, uniforms and clothing, artifacts, audio recordings, publications, and other materials from Swem’s Special Collections Research Center, the exhibit provided a general overview of music at the College of William and Mary, with a major emphasis on student groups.