USA Virginia - The History : USA  

USA Virginia - The History - Travel guide

USA

USA Virginia - The History

The History

The first European to see Virginia may have been John Cabot, who reached the North American coast for England in 1497 and may have explored it the next year. The Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano explored the coast for France in 1524. In 1570 the Spanish started a religious mission on the Rappahannock River near the site of Fredericksburg, but Native Americans wiped it out.

In 1606 King James I of England granted to two commercial companies the right to colonize Virginia, a name the English used broadly to describe the Atlantic coast of North America. One company, the Virginia Company of London, dispatched a fleet of three ships, the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery, under the command of Captain Christopher Newport. The ships headed toward the general location of an earlier, unsuccessful 'Virginia' colony, the Second Roanoke Island colony of 1587. The site of that colony is now in the state of North Carolina.

After four months at sea, the voyagers explored the coast north of the old colonial site and found the vast, attractive inlet of Chesapeake Bay. Entering the bay, they sailed up a river they named the James. In May 1607 they landed on a swampy peninsula and erected Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America.

Virginia was England's first successful overseas colony and the site of the first permanent English settlement in America. At one time it held territory from which several other states were later formed. West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863. Virginia's rich political heritage helped shape the democratic principles on which the United States was founded. Virginia played an important role in the American Revolution (1775-1783), and it entered the Union as the tenth of the original 13 states on June 25, 1788. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) the state's capital, Richmond, was also capital of the Confederacy. The state has long been nicknamed Old Dominion.

Virginia became the 1oth State to Unite under America on June 25, 1788.