Architectural Remains, Project 103, Structure 125, Jamestown, James City County, Virginia

Significance: Likely Structure 125 served as a tavern and was the one documentary evidence records as being operated by Thomas Rabley in the 1680s and 1690s.

Architectural and archaeological evidence reveals a two-story building with three-room plan and one chimney on the east end. There might have been a stair tower and a porch tower on the north and south sides. There were two large rooms on the ground floor with a smaller, inner room at the west end, and a full cellar accessible via stairs in the bulkhead entrance at the southeast corner of the building. The east cellar was heated, with a hearth, and the separate cellar under the middle room was a cooler space with brick paving. A cistern was discovered here. The cellar walls were covered in a rough cast plaster.

The three-room plan, with a porch and a stair tower, and shed rooms was not atypical of the period, but the lack of a chimney for the other large room is unusual. This large unheated space suggests the building's use as a tavern, with the unheated space serving as a taproom.

It is possible this tavern became a temporary meeting place for the burgesses or the councilors after Bacon's Rebellion or perhaps its two large rooms housed the court or assembly.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century the building was no longer in use. Richard Ambler eventually acquired the property, and the ruins of the building are likely those depicted in the foreground of a painting of the Ambler plantation on Jamestown Island in 1839 by George Mack.
Survey number: HABS VA-473
Building/structure dates: ca. 1650- ca. 1680 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: before 1839 Demolished
Building/structure dates: before 1839 Demolished