WILLIAMSBURG, Va.— A College of William and Mary professor thinks he may have found the nation’s oldest surviving schoolhouse for African-American children.

English professor Terry Meyers believes the college — at Benjamin Franklin’s urging — was instrumental in opening the Williamsburg Bray School in 1760 to educate both free and enslaved Blacks.

The find would be remarkable not only for its historical significance, but for its location in the political and ideological epicenter of slavery. The college itself was funded by taxes on tobacco harvested by slaves. The college, its faculty and even some students owned slaves, and slave labor built core campus buildings, maintained the grounds and fed the residents.

It also runs counter to later sentiments in Virginia and other Southern states, which explicitly forbade teaching slaves to read or write. An 1819 Virginia law made doing so punishable by 20 lashes.

“To me, the Bray School stands out as a bright spot in an otherwise dark narrative,” Dr. Meyers said.

Meyers, a 65-year-old English scholar, found details in Colonial documents that other scholars had missed. In a book of town lore, there was mention of an 18th-century home that had gone missing.

The home, located across from the college campus, had belonged to Dudley Digges. Meyers believes historians lost track of the house because they linked it to the wrong Digges, a Yorktown patriot. Another Dudley Digges, the patriot’s uncle, had bought a home in Williamsburg.

Colonial records show Digges rented out the home to an English charity, the Associates of Dr. Bray, in 1760.

Franklin, the future Founding Father, had proposed Williamsburg as one of three Colonial sites for the “Instruction of Negro Children.”

Records show the Bray School endured until the death of the schoolmistress, Anne Wager, in 1774. Wager taught as many as 30 students at a time, mostly slaves, including two, Adam and Fanny, who were owned by the college.