50 Fun Facts About Colony of Virginia

The name Virginia was chosen in the 1580s to honor which English monarch, known as the Virgin Queen?

Elizabeth I was on the throne when the name was first given, in about 1584, more than twenty years before Jamestown was founded.

Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood sent the naval force that killed which pirate off North Carolina in 1718?

Blackbeard died fighting Lieutenant Robert Maynard's men at Ocracoke Inlet. Spotswood had sent the two armed sloops into another colony's waters without waiting for his own assembly to approve.

Which Native woman, baptized Rebecca, married a Virginia tobacco planter in 1614 and died at Gravesend, England?

Pocahontas became a celebrity in England and attended a masque at Whitehall Palace before King James. She fell ill just as her ship set out for home.

Which US state is named for the Virginia governor whose fleet turned back colonists abandoning Jamestown in 1610?

Delaware takes its name from Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, who met the departing survivors a few miles down the James River and ordered them back.

The Sea Venture, flagship of a 1609 supply fleet bound for Virginia, was wrecked in a storm on which Atlantic island?

Bermuda was uninhabited, and the castaways spent about nine months there building two small ships from local cedar to finish the voyage to Jamestown.

Why did the Virginia Company begin shipping young Englishwomen to Jamestown in 1619, at a cost paid in tobacco?

To become wives and start families was the offer: men outnumbered women about seven to one, and each husband repaid his bride's passage in tobacco.

Which nickname did Virginia reputedly earn from King Charles II for its loyalty during the English Civil War?

Old Dominion is still the state's nickname. By tradition, the restored king was thanking Virginians who had stayed loyal to the monarchy while Parliament ruled England.

Which Virginia lawyer told the colony's 1775 convention that he would choose death over a life without liberty?

Patrick Henry was urging Virginia to raise a militia independent of royal authority. His resolutions passed only narrowly, with many delegates unsure where resistance would lead.

What shape was the wooden fort that Jamestown's first colonists finished building beside the James River in June 1607?

Triangular palisade walls enclosed a storehouse and a handful of houses, and the whole fort was finished about a month after the colonists landed.

Which animal's English name comes from the Algonquian language spoken around Jamestown, Virginia, in the early 1600s?

Opossum comes from a local word meaning roughly a white dog-like beast. The Virginia species is the only one found in the United States and Canada.

Which Jamestown colonist made Virginia profitable by planting a sweeter Caribbean strain of tobacco in the 1610s?

John Rolfe had obtained the seeds from Trinidad illegally: Spain threatened death to anyone who sold them to a foreigner.

Which elected Virginia body, first convened at Jamestown in 1619, was the Americas' first representative legislature?

The House of Burgesses began with 22 elected members and a six-day session. It lasted until 1776, when independent Virginia turned it into the House of Delegates.

Which town, formerly called Middle Plantation, replaced Jamestown as the capital of colonial Virginia in 1699?

Williamsburg was renamed in honor of King William III to suit its new status, and it stayed Virginia's capital until 1780.

What name do historians give the winter of 1609–10, when only about 60 of Jamestown's 500 colonists survived?

The Starving Time followed a drought that left the colony's fields barren. There is historical and scientific evidence that some colonists turned to cannibalism.

The first Jamestown colonists reached Virginia in 1607 by sailing into which body of water, the largest US estuary?

Chesapeake Bay's mouth is where they first came ashore after more than four months at sea, an event remembered as the First Landing.

Which planter led a 1676 uprising against Governor William Berkeley and burned Jamestown, then Virginia's capital?

Nathaniel Bacon died of dysentery about five weeks after the burning. Governor Berkeley was recalled to England, where he died soon after landing.

Which young Virginia militia major carried Governor Dinwiddie's 1753 demand that French forces leave the Ohio Country?

George Washington was 21. A skirmish he led the following year, the Jumonville affair, became the incident that ignited the French and Indian War.

At which Virginia port did Lord Cornwallis's army surrender in 1781, in the last major land battle of the Revolution?

Yorktown cost Britain more than 7,000 captured soldiers and led to peace talks. Cornwallis stayed away from the surrender ceremony, claiming illness.

What product did German and Polish craftsmen begin making at Jamestown in 1608, soon after they arrived in Virginia?

Glass was an early success for the struggling colony: the craftsmen managed to send a sample of their glassware home to England.

Which captain, elected president of Jamestown's council in 1608, ruled that colonists who refused to work would not eat?

John Smith was borrowing a line from the New Testament. A gunpowder explosion in his canoe injured him so badly in 1609 that he sailed to England for treatment.

Early Virginia shipped tobacco home alongside which aromatic plant, later used to flavor root beer?

Sassafras was prized in Europe as well as America: every part of the tree, from root to bark, has been used for flavoring, scent or medicine.

Which Virginia land policy, begun in 1618, granted 50 acres to anyone who paid a new settler's passage?

The headright system was meant to ease the labor shortage of the tobacco boom, but planters who shipped in many servants piled up land, widening the divide between rich and poor.

Under which labor arrangement did many English emigrants work four or five years in Virginia to repay their passage?

Indentured servitude brought between half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the thirteen colonies from the 1630s to the American Revolution.

The first recorded Africans in English Virginia, landed at Point Comfort in 1619, came from which present-day country?

Angola was where Portuguese forces had captured them. An English privateer, the White Lion, then seized about twenty from a slave ship bound for Mexico.

Which paramount chief led about 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes of Tidewater Virginia when Jamestown was founded in 1607?

Powhatan's own name was Wahunsenacawh. The English called him after his hometown, which stood near the falls of the James River.

Which English courtier held the 1584 charter behind the failed Roanoke colony, in the region first called Virginia?

Sir Walter Raleigh's charter required him to plant a colony by 1591. He lost it for good in 1603, when he was arrested for treason against King James.

Which 120-ton ship was the largest of the three that carried the first English colonists to Jamestown in 1607?

Susan Constant sailed home that June with a cargo of supposedly precious minerals, leaving 104 colonists behind in Virginia.

The College of William & Mary, chartered in Virginia in 1693, is America's second-oldest college after which school?

Harvard dates from 1636. The Virginia college was named for the reigning king and queen, and its charter let it appoint the colony's county surveyors.

Which present-day state began as a Virginia county created in 1776 and later joined the Union as the 15th state?

Kentucky County was split into three counties in 1780, and the district left Virginia to become a state in 1792. Virginia's western claims also took in what became Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Which neighboring colony was carved from Virginia's charter lands in 1632 as a haven for English Catholics?

Maryland's charter went to Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, whose father had asked for it. Carolina's charters of the 1660s then trimmed Virginia from the south.

What name was given to the royalist supporters of King Charles I, many of whom moved to Virginia after his defeat?

Cavaliers began as a term of abuse thrown by their Roundhead enemies, and the University of Virginia's sports teams still carry the name.

Which denomination was colonial Virginia's official religion from 1619 until shortly after the American Revolution?

Anglican parishes also handled many local affairs, and they were controlled by a closed circle of wealthy landowners on the vestry rather than by the minister.

Settlers who landed at Berkeley Hundred, Virginia, in 1619 were ordered to keep that date every year as what?

A day of thanksgiving was first kept there on December 4, 1619, about a year before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, which is why Virginia claims the older Thanksgiving.

Why did Polish craftsmen at Jamestown refuse to work in 1619, in the first recorded strike in the New World?

To win the vote: Virginia's first elections had shut out everyone not of English descent. Under pressure, the company's council reversed the decision.

Thomas Jefferson began building which hilltop Virginia home in 1768, while the colony was still under British rule?

Monticello means little mountain in Italian. The house has appeared on the back of the US nickel almost every year since 1938.

Which royal governor of Virginia promised freedom in 1775 to enslaved people of rebels who joined the British army?

Lord Dunmore had already taken refuge on a British warship that June after being driven from the capital. He left Virginia after the burning of Norfolk in 1776.

Which Virginia planter principally wrote the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, a basis for the US Bill of Rights?

George Mason went on to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where he was one of only three delegates who refused to sign the finished Constitution.

Planter William Byrd II had which Virginia city laid out in 1737 at the falls of the James River?

Richmond was named after the English town near London, because the bend of the river reminded Byrd of the view from his old home on the Thames.

Virginia's 1716 Knights of the Golden Horseshoe expedition crossed which mountain range to reach the Shenandoah Valley?

The Blue Ridge Mountains were crossed by the royal governor himself, who is said to have given each of his companions a small golden horseshoe afterwards.

Colonial Virginia planters shipped tobacco in which large wooden barrels, each weighing about 1,000 pounds when full?

Hogsheads were hauled to official inspection warehouses, where a 1730 law had inspectors grade the leaf at 40 named locations.

A 1662 Virginia law made whether a child was born free or enslaved depend on what?

The mother's status decided it, the reverse of English common law, under which a child's standing followed the father's. Children of enslaved women were therefore born enslaved.

What kind of public institution, the first in what became the United States, opened in Virginia's capital in 1773?

A mental hospital, later called Eastern State, admitted its first patients that October. The original building stood until it burned down in 1885.

Daniel Boone widened a trail in 1775 through which mountain pass near Virginia's border with Tennessee?

Cumberland Gap had been brought to settlers' attention in 1750 by Thomas Walker, a Virginia physician and explorer, and it became a key stretch of the Wilderness Road.

Which colonial route carried German and Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania into Virginia's Shenandoah Valley?

The Great Wagon Road entered the valley near present-day Martinsburg, and its Shenandoah stretch is also known as the Valley Pike.

Which speaker of Virginia's colonial assembly presided over the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774?

Peyton Randolph came from Virginia's wealthiest family and was a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been speaker before him.

The 1609 wreck of the Virginia-bound ship Sea Venture is widely thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest opens with a shipwreck, and an eyewitness report by survivor William Strachey may have been a source for that scene.

In what kind of building did Virginia's first elected assembly hold its six-day opening session at Jamestown in 1619?

A church hosted the session, a new timber building about 50 feet long and 20 feet wide that the colonists had only recently finished.

In 1619, colonists at Falling Creek in Virginia built the first works in North America for producing which metal?

Iron production at Falling Creek was short-lived: an attack by Native Americans in 1622 put an end to the works.

Which nobleman, the only British peer to live permanently in the colonies, owned over five million acres of Virginia?

Lord Fairfax's domain took in much of the Shenandoah Valley. He spent most of his life in Virginia and stayed loyal to Britain through the Revolution.

Virginia's colonial assembly passed defiant resolves in 1765 against which new British tax on the American colonies?

The Stamp Act resolves held that Virginians could be taxed only by an assembly they elected themselves. Nine other colonies later sent delegates to a congress of protest.