WILLIAMSBURG The city has known tough and obscure times between its heyday as the Colonial capital and its revival as a living-history exhibit.

Until the late 17th century, Williamsburg, known then as Middle Plantation, was a small cluster of buildings in lightly inhabited plantation country. It was the midpoint in a security fence stretching across the peninsula from the Colonial capital at Jamestown.

Some of the colony's most influential men, sick of Jamestown's malarial swamps and its distance from the westward-expanding colony, arranged to move the capital in 1699 to Middle Plantation, said Thaddeus W. Tate Jr., a retired professor of history at the College of William and Mary.

Williamsburg, renamed for the reigning William III, grew into the Colonial center of power and commerce, a meeting place for politicians, sea captains and tobacco merchants. The government erected grand buildings, including the Capitol and the Governor's Palace. "Governor's Palace" was originally a derogatory reference by colonists to the size and expense of the governor's house.

Inside Williamsburg's Raleigh Tavern, Patrick Henry and other patriots spoke against tyranny and for freedom. Outside the tavern, slaves were sold at auction.

The Revolutionary War tore up Williamsburg. At the end, French troops from the Battle of Yorktown were using the college's Wren Building as a field hospital. But a much harder blow was the loss of the state capital in 1780 to Richmond.

Williamsburg no longer was centrally located because the state was expanding so quickly -- the same reason Jamestown had lost the statehouse to Williamsburg eight decades before, said Phillip Hamilton, an associate professor of history at Christopher Newport University in Newport News.

The departure of state money, power and prestige left Williamsburg "a bit of a backwater," Hamilton said.

The Civil War brought more destruction, including the third burning of the Wren Building. The once-grand Colonial buildings became dilapidated. In 1912, the Richmond Times-Dispatch scolded Williamsburg officials for forgetting about an election.

Williamsburg awakened with a jolt in 1926, when the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. announced that the Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin, a college professor and former rector of Bruton Parish Church, had persuaded him to finance the restoration of the Colonial area. Rockefeller's fortune created the living-history attraction of today.

After World War II, Colonial Williamsburg stressed the theme of the Revolution, which resonated during the Cold War era, Tate said.

Williamsburg and nearby Jamestown and Yorktown became symbolic stops for visiting dignitaries from around the world. (Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to visit Jamestown in May.)

Over time, William and Mary has developed into one of the nation's most selective small public colleges. Williamsburg became a center for tourism and is attracting retirees.

Like much of the Hampton Roads region, Williamsburg is increasingly surrounded by new subdivisions, shopping centers and busy highways. But at its core, it retains the Colonial atmosphere that makes it one of the nation's most-visited places.