🏛️Virginia

The Old Dominion

Virginia is the birthplace of American constitutional government. The first permanent English settlement in North America was planted at Jamestown in 1607, and four of the first five presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — were Virginians. Yet the state is also inseparable from the Civil War: Richmond served as the Confederate capital, and more major battles were fought on Virginia soil than anywhere else.

Jamestown

On May 14, 1607, a group of 104 English colonists sponsored by the Virginia Company landed on a peninsula in what they called the James River (after King James I) and established the settlement of Jamestown. It was a brutal start — disease, starvation, and conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy killed most of the early settlers. But the colony survived, and by the 1620s tobacco exports had made Virginia economically viable. The first Africans brought involuntarily to what would become the United States arrived at Point Comfort in 1619, beginning the American chapter of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Cradle of Presidents

Eight U.S. presidents were born in Virginia, more than any other state: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. Four of the first five came from Virginia's planter class, and Monticello (Jefferson's home near Charlottesville) and Mount Vernon (Washington's home on the Potomac) remain two of the most visited historic homes in America.

Revolutionary Role

The Virginia House of Burgesses, founded in 1619, was the first elected legislative assembly in the English colonies and a direct ancestor of the U.S. Congress. Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech was delivered at St. John's Church in Richmond in 1775. George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became the model for both the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The Revolutionary War effectively ended on Virginia soil. On October 19, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army to George Washington at Yorktown, ending major combat operations.

Capital of the Confederacy

When Virginia seceded in 1861, the Confederate government relocated its capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond — placing the capitals of the United States (Washington) and the Confederate States (Richmond) barely 100 miles apart. The corridor between them became the most contested ground in American history. Major battles at Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg all happened in Virginia. The war effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the village of Appomattox Court House in central Virginia.

Geography and Modern Virginia

Virginia spans five distinct regions: the Tidewater along the Atlantic coast, the Piedmont plateau, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Great Valley, and the Allegheny Highlands in the far west. Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington D.C., is home to the Pentagon and an enormous concentration of defense and technology firms. Hampton Roads hosts the world's largest naval base at Norfolk. The state is also home to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley.

Virginia Facts

• Virginia is officially a "commonwealth" rather than a state, like Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Kentucky.
• The phrase "Old Dominion" was bestowed by King Charles II in recognition of Virginia's loyalty during the English Civil War.
• Arlington National Cemetery sits on land that was once the estate of Robert E. Lee's wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee.
• Williamsburg served as the colonial capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780 and is now the world's largest living-history museum.
• Virginia's Chincoteague and Assateague islands are home to the wild ponies made famous by the children's novel Misty of Chincoteague.

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