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Commonwealth of Virginia
In 1583, Queen Elizabeth II, the "Virgin Queen", commissioned Sir Walter Raleigh to establish an English colony along the Atlantic coast of North America.  While his efforts at Roanoke Island ended in failure, his name for the colony — Virginia, in honor of his patroness — stuck.  In 1607, the joint-stock Virginia Company established a more successful settlement at Jamestown, setting in motion the birth of a great new nation.
King Charles II bestowed the nickname "Old Dominion" on the colony for its loyalty to the crown during the 17th-century English civil war.  Nevertheless, Virginia became a hotbed of revolution in the 1770s, and witnessed the climactic battle of the war of American independence at Yorktown in 1781. Virginia was the largest and most prosperous of the original 13 colonies, and has been the birthplace to more U.S. Presidents — eight, including Washington, Jefferson, and Wilson —than any other state.  It is no coincidence that the new federal capital was laid out on the banks of the Potomac in 1791.
Still, Virginia depended heavily on the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and so seceded to the Confederate States of America in 1861.  Some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War were fought on its territory, over a third of which was lost to the new state of West Virginia, which remained in the Union.  After the war, Virginia imposed Jim Crow laws to keep the races separate and unequal, and legal discrimination persisted until 1971.  Since then, however, Virginia has become a much more cosmopolitan and well-governed place, with some of the highest per-capita income in the country.

Virginia is for Lovers | Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities | Chamber of Commerce

 Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail | Civil War Battlefields in Virginia | Central Virginia Battlefields Trust

Richmond
Like many East Coast cities, Virginia's capital is located along the so-called "fall line", the boundary between the Tidewater coastal region and the Piedmont highlands.  Captain Christopher Newport and Captain John Smith led the first European expedition to the future site of the city, at the highest navigable point along the James River, less than a month after founding Jamestown in 1607.
A small settlement soon sprung up at the falls, but was wiped out by the Powhatan uprising in 1622. A frontier community again arose in the area under the protection of Fort Charles, erected nearby in 1645.
In 1737, William Byrd II founded Richmond, named for the city in England where he grew up.  The town received its charter five years later.
Richmond came to prominence during the Revolutionary War.  Patrick Henry delivered his famous "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech here in 1775, during the Second Virginia Convention.  Governor Thomas Jefferson moved the Virginia capital from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1781, but could not prevent the city from being burned the following year by British troops under the command of Benedict Arnold.
 

 

  
Richmond soon recovered, and was incorporated as a city in 1782.  Three years later, construction of Jefferson's State Capitol building, and the James River and Kanawha Canal designed by George Washington, ensued.  In 1786, the Assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, written by Jefferson and James Madison, granting separation of church and state — a precursor to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
During the 19th century, Richmond emerged as an important transportation hub and industrial center, home to the largest foundry — the Tredegar Iron Works — in the South.  After Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, the capital of the Confederacy was moved here from Montgomery, Alabama.
Much of the Civil War was fought between Richmond and Washington, D.C., which are separated by a mere 100 miles, as Union armies repeatedly attempted to capture the Confederate capital.  General Ulysses S. Grant was finally successful in April 1865, after laying siege to Richmond and Petersburg for nearly ten months.  Retreating Confederate forces set fire to the abandoned capital during their evacuation of the city.
 

 

  
Federal troops occupied Richmond during Reconstruction, after which racial segregation and nostalgia for the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy firmly took hold.  Laid out in 1887, Monument Avenue honors many Confederate heroes, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.  This avenue was finally desegregated in 1996 with the unveiling of a statue of African-American tennis player Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native.
 

 

  
Other famous Richmond residents not honored on Monument Avenue include John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835, and the 19th-century poet Edgar Allen Poe.

Other Richmond attractions

Virginia regions:
 Hampton Roads | Northern Virginia | Piedmont | Blue Ridge

This page was first published 31 May 2008, and last updated 03 January 2009.