repairs; unless you were rich, you made do with new arrangements of old parts.

“How much would a cobbler make in an average year?” my husband, Kevin, asked a man in a dim interior fragrant with the smell of leather.

“I wouldn’t know,” the man answered gruffly. “The cobbler’s shop is across town. I’m a shoemaker.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Cobble means ‘mess up,’” the shoemaker answered. “Cobblestone streets are paved, but not well. A fruit cobbler is a pie with no shape.”

“How much would a pair of shoes cost?” Kevin asked, still trying to get his economic bearings. “How long would they last?”

“That would be a contract between you and your shoes.”

While we waited on a bench to tour the capitol, a guide reminded us that Williamsburg was the capital of the colony of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, when Richmond took over the role. The burgesses who met here were elected representatives from various parts of the colony; anyone who was free, white, male, over 21, a property-holder, and an Anglican could vote. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Mason all served as burgesses here, and this is where Mr. Henry made his impassioned speech against the Stamp Act in 1765. (His most famous speech, the one that concludes “Give me liberty, or give me death,” was delivered in a Richmond church.) Inside the capitol, a guide asked leading questions about what he called “recent” Revolutionary-era events in Boston, and someone else’s 12-year-old knew all the answers.

Consulting the day’s schedule, we found that Patrick Henry was speaking in the garden behind the Governor’s Palace, and we hurried there in time to hear him complain about Britain’s insistence on quartering troops in private houses. When he finished his prepared remarks, Mr. Henry offered to take “queries and curiosities” from the audience, noting that he had “the ability to speculate into the future with great accuracy.”

The historical characters we encountered were so engaging that I began to wonder about them. Were they professional actors? Did they get together outside of work? Was it exhausting fielding the same questions over and over again? Was it unbearably hot in those clothes in the summer?

“The wig sometimes gets hot,” admitted Richard Schumann, who plays Patrick Henry. Schumann and his colleagues have a meeting almost every day to share research, he said, and they joke with one another in the language of the period. Schumann did train as an actor, and, to learn how people spoke in the eighteenth century, he read letters, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and plays. Now that he’s read everything there is to read about Patrick Henry, he’s starting to read about Henry’s friends.

“In 1774, we don’t have standardized rules of grammar yet,” Schumann said. “Even gentlemen of great education, like Richard Henry

Lee, might write, ‘I were born and raised in Westmorland County,’ or ‘We was going to the city.’ When we pepper our talks with that language, it draws people into the time machine.”

The next day, we drove to Carter’s Grove, a plantation six miles from town overlooking the James River, where Colonial Williamsburg most directly addresses the issue of slavery. We walked through the rough cabins in the slave quarters, but the guides there were preparing to address a large school group that arrived just after us, so we moved on to the main house, built in the 1750s and expanded in the 1930s, and to the ongoing archeological excavation of Wolstenholme Towne, a fort and settlement that date from 1620. The metal helmets that have been dug up here looked startlingly medieval, a physical link to the great age of exploration.

That afternoon, back in Colonial Williamsburg, we strolled down Duke of Gloucester Street, checking out what was for lunch at the taverns (bubble and squeak, a potato and cabbage dish named for the sounds it makes on the stove) and sampling the root beer and oatmeal cakes sold from tables set up outside. Our son Dan played “Eleanor Rigby” on a harpsichord in the cabinet-maker’s shop; his brother, Jim, pointed out a child walking around playing a Game Boy: “What a waste of time, right?”

Wandering side streets, we came upon the Tenant House, a modest dwelling furnished to give a sense of working-class life. When we came out the back door, we found a large man hurling an ax at a tree stump. He was competing in an ax-throwing contest on the green later that afternoon, he said, and he was better than anyone at the throw at 12 paces, although he sometimes missed deliberately so that his opponents would wager more against him.

At the appointed hour, hundreds of visitors gathered on the green. A large rectangle of grass was cordoned off and a target wheeled in. Our friend the ax thrower worked the audience at the edge of the ropes, introducing himself as William Moses, a free black Baptist preacher. Sadly, some of the long throws he had practiced so successfully now bounced off the tree stump, and Moses lost to a tavern keeper.

On our last day, while Kevin took the boys to the promised roller coasters, I set out on a deserted yellow gravel road to Jamestown, on the coast, where the first settlers landed in 1607. The Colonial Parkway runs for 23 miles from Yorktown to Jamestown, winding through an unspoiled landscape; in the woods, red-bud and wild dogwood were in bloom.

I had planned to spend a few minutes poking around the brick foundations that remain from that first settlement, but I was swept up into a tour with a woman in colonial dress who introduced herself as Rachel Stanton, an indentured servant. She was holding an exotic species of fowl, and she spoke to her audience as if

we were starry-eyed new settlers who needed to be set straight. “Why do ye think the Indians was willing to give over this piece of land? Because it were a swamp!” If you want to get someone’s attention, speak strangely and carry a Poland rooster.

Later, I asked Mary Wiseman, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for more than 25 years, what it’s like to interpret the colonial world to today’s visitors. Her current role is Martha Washington, whose great-grandfather was the first rector of Bruton Parish Church. Martha spent her honeymoon in Williamsburg, and her husband served his first term in the House of Burgesses in 1759.

Martha Washington wrote far less than her male contemporaries; to prepare to play her, Ms. Wiseman walked the grounds where Martha was born, visited her church, read up on life on small plantations, and studied her letters, which the modern-day interpreter calls her “islands of security” as she plays the role of the first First Lady.

Hadn’t Martha burned her letters from George?

“Yes, for privacy reasons. You know, when Nancy Reagan brought out I Love You, Ronnie, my twentieth-century self thought it was good that his letters to her would all be together. My eighteenth-century self was shocked.”

I asked if visitors to Williamsburg had changed over the years.

“Their attention span is shorter now. I have about 15 minutes to reach them; people have that invisible remote in their hand. I find myself teaching about honor and honesty, thinking of the other person. At the Mary Stith House once, I had to almost dislodge some Boy Scouts from their seats to give them to some older ladies.

“People come to Williamsburg to find out what made the great men great,” Ms. Wiseman said. “On September 12, 2001, I had to go onstage. The theater was bulging because so many people were stranded here, and I thought, 'What am I going to say to comfort them?' But I realized there were similarities between 1774 and now. Colonial Virginians were facing a dangerous future. Their world was turning upside down. I began by reading one of George Washington’s favorite psalms: ‘Thou shall not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’ You could have heard a pin drop.”