vicinity of the church and the college. He feared they would be completely destroyed as time went on. In 1924, Dr Goodwin started a movement to preserve the buildings in the district. As his primary source of funding, Dr Goodwin was fortunate in this effort to sign on John D. Rockefeller Jr., the wealthy son of the founder of Standard Oil, and his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He stimulated their interest in the old city and helped that grow into the incredible generosity that financed the restoration. Together, through their personal efforts and diligence, and funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Abby and John Rockefeller worked with Dr Goodwin and others to make the remarkable dream of restoring the old colonial capital come true. Search for “Bacon’s Vault” In 1938 Marie Bauer, a follower and the future wife of prominent mystic Manly P. Hall, claimed to have deciphered information hidden in George Wither’s 1635 book A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne that under the foundations of the first brick church at Bruton Parish was a secret vault containing lost writings by Sir Francis Bacon, including proof that Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays and plans for a utopian society. Bauer received permission from the parish to conduct an excavation, and using coordinates she reportedly decoded from various tombstones on the grounds, uncovered the foundations of the original 1683 brick church. The excavation was halted after digging to a depth of about nine feet for fear of desecrating the graves in the churchyard. Bauer then hired an engineering firm to conduct metal-detecting tests on the site, which concluded that “At a depth of from sixteen to twenty feet square…lies a body partially filled and much larger than an ordinary tomb.” Interest in the supposed vault was rekindled in 1985 after radar tests indicated possible disturbed soil beneath the site of the 1938 dig. Following the arrest of three people caught digging on the church grounds in the middle of the night, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation conducted a new excavation in the summer of 1992. Following Bauer's original calculations, archeologists dug to a depth of twenty feet without locating any evidence of a vault. A geologist from the College of William & Mary took several soil samples and concluded that the ground at that depth had lain undisturbed for three million years. The Church today Today Colonial Williamsburg's Historic Area