The Capitol at the east end of Duke of Gloucester Street is a reconstructed building on the site of colonial Virginia's legislature in Williamsburg. After a Jamestown statehouse burned in 1698, lawmakers chose Middle Plantation, soon renamed Williamsburg, as a new capital. Work on the first Capitol began in 1701 and the building was substantially complete in 1705. Its two wings accommodated the House of Burgesses and the appointed Council, while courts and other colonial government business also used the complex.

Government here depended on more than the men who occupied the chambers. Enslaved labor helped build and sustain Williamsburg; laws enacted by colonial officials regulated slavery, land, trade, and relations with Native nations. Petitions, trials, public meetings, and the work of clerks linked the building to the wider colony. Fire destroyed the first Capitol in 1747. A second structure rose on the old foundations in the early 1750s with a changed exterior, including squared ends and a west portico.

The second Capitol, rather than the earlier building represented by today's reconstruction, was the setting for the final decades of royal rule. Patrick Henry and other burgesses contested imperial taxation and authority. In 1776 Virginia's convention adopted a Declaration of Rights and instructed its delegates to propose independence; these actions involved Williamsburg's political community, though the precise rooms and institutions should not be collapsed into one event. Virginia's state government subsequently used the capital during the war, before moving its seat to Richmond in 1780.

Without the government, the Capitol building entered other uses and declined. A fire destroyed it in 1832, leaving the foundations as the strongest physical link to the eighteenth-century structures. Preservation advocates secured the site, and Colonial Williamsburg undertook archaeological and documentary research in the twentieth century. Between 1931 and 1934 the foundation rebuilt the Capitol using the better documented first building as its model. That decision means the present chambers evoke colonial government but are not the very rooms in which Revolutionary-era leaders debated.

Today interpreters lead visitors through a reconstructed civic interior and explain legislation, courts, political authority, and the experiences of people excluded from formal representation. The building is a product of 1930s scholarship and craftsmanship over an older archaeological site; later research can refine the interpretation of its design and use. Its location and restored setting make the sequence of two colonial Capitols, their destruction, the capital's move, and the choices of modern preservation legible together.