The College of William and Mary in Virginia was chartered on 8 February 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II, the King and Queen of England, as a seminary for the Church of England in Virginia. Middle Plantation, a halfway point between Jamestown along the James River and the small settlement of Chiskiack along the York River, was selected as the site of this new school. On the site of what is now the President's House ran a wooden palisade built in 1633 that cut through Middle Plantation to prevent Powhatan incursions in the aftermath of the massacre of English settlers in 1622 and the ensuing Second Anglo-Powhatan War. The palisade survived less than a decade but figured largely in the societal memory of the first students at the College over 60 years later.