Colony of Virginia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Colony of Virginia trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Virginia was England's first lasting foothold in North America, and over the next 169 years it grew into the most populous of the thirteen colonies. Its story begins with a hungry fort on a swampy river island and ends with a generation of planters who helped lead a revolution. This quiz collects the fun facts behind that story: how the colony got its name and its nickname, the crop that saved it, the shipwreck that reached the London stage, the rebels who burned the capital, and the odd laws, exports and firsts that rarely make the textbooks. You will meet governors, chiefs, sea captains and a pirate hunter along the way. It is written for students revising colonial America, for teachers and quiz hosts who need accurate questions, and for anyone curious about how the American story started. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The name Virginia was chosen in the 1580s to honor which English monarch, known as the Virgin Queen?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I was on the throne when the name was first given, in about 1584, more than twenty years before Jamestown was founded.
Q 02Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood sent the naval force that killed which pirate off North Carolina in 1718?
Blackbeard
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.
Q 03Which Native woman, baptized Rebecca, married a Virginia tobacco planter in 1614 and died at Gravesend, England?
Pocahontas
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.
Q 04Which US state is named for the Virginia governor whose fleet turned back colonists abandoning Jamestown in 1610?
Delaware
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.
Q 05The Sea Venture, flagship of a 1609 supply fleet bound for Virginia, was wrecked in a storm on which Atlantic island?
Bermuda
Bermuda was uninhabited, and the castaways spent about nine months there building two small ships from local cedar to finish the voyage to Jamestown.
Q 06Why did the Virginia Company begin shipping young Englishwomen to Jamestown in 1619, at a cost paid in tobacco?
To become wives
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.
Q 07Which nickname did Virginia reputedly earn from King Charles II for its loyalty during the English Civil War?
Old Dominion
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.
Q 08Which Virginia lawyer told the colony's 1775 convention that he would choose death over a life without liberty?
Patrick Henry
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.
Q 09What shape was the wooden fort that Jamestown's first colonists finished building beside the James River in June 1607?
Triangular
Triangular palisade walls enclosed a storehouse and a handful of houses, and the whole fort was finished about a month after the colonists landed.
Q 10Which animal's English name comes from the Algonquian language spoken around Jamestown, Virginia, in the early 1600s?
Opossum
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.
Q 11Which Jamestown colonist made Virginia profitable by planting a sweeter Caribbean strain of tobacco in the 1610s?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe had obtained the seeds from Trinidad illegally: Spain threatened death to anyone who sold them to a foreigner.
Q 12Which elected Virginia body, first convened at Jamestown in 1619, was the Americas' first representative legislature?
House of Burgesses
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.
Q 13Which town, formerly called Middle Plantation, replaced Jamestown as the capital of colonial Virginia in 1699?
Williamsburg
Q 21Early Virginia shipped tobacco home alongside which aromatic plant, later used to flavor root beer?
Sassafras
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.
Q 22Which Virginia land policy, begun in 1618, granted 50 acres to anyone who paid a new settler's passage?
Headright system
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.
Q 23Under which labor arrangement did many English emigrants work four or five years in Virginia to repay their passage?
Indentured servitude
Williamsburg was renamed in honor of King William III to suit its new status, and it stayed Virginia's capital until 1780.
Q 14What name do historians give the winter of 1609–10, when only about 60 of Jamestown's 500 colonists survived?
The Starving Time
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.
Q 15The first Jamestown colonists reached Virginia in 1607 by sailing into which body of water, the largest US estuary?
Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay's mouth is where they first came ashore after more than four months at sea, an event remembered as the First Landing.
Q 16Which planter led a 1676 uprising against Governor William Berkeley and burned Jamestown, then Virginia's capital?
Nathaniel Bacon
Nathaniel Bacon died of dysentery about five weeks after the burning. Governor Berkeley was recalled to England, where he died soon after landing.
Q 17Which young Virginia militia major carried Governor Dinwiddie's 1753 demand that French forces leave the Ohio Country?
George Washington
George Washington was 21. A skirmish he led the following year, the Jumonville affair, became the incident that ignited the French and Indian War.
Q 18At which Virginia port did Lord Cornwallis's army surrender in 1781, in the last major land battle of the Revolution?
Yorktown
Yorktown cost Britain more than 7,000 captured soldiers and led to peace talks. Cornwallis stayed away from the surrender ceremony, claiming illness.
Q 19What product did German and Polish craftsmen begin making at Jamestown in 1608, soon after they arrived in Virginia?
Glass
Glass was an early success for the struggling colony: the craftsmen managed to send a sample of their glassware home to England.
Q 20Which captain, elected president of Jamestown's council in 1608, ruled that colonists who refused to work would not eat?
John Smith
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.
Indentured servitude brought between half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the thirteen colonies from the 1630s to the American Revolution.
Q 24The first recorded Africans in English Virginia, landed at Point Comfort in 1619, came from which present-day country?
Angola
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.
Q 25Which paramount chief led about 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes of Tidewater Virginia when Jamestown was founded in 1607?
Powhatan
Powhatan's own name was Wahunsenacawh. The English called him after his hometown, which stood near the falls of the James River.
Q 26Which English courtier held the 1584 charter behind the failed Roanoke colony, in the region first called Virginia?
Sir Walter Raleigh
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.
Q 27Which 120-ton ship was the largest of the three that carried the first English colonists to Jamestown in 1607?
Susan Constant
Susan Constant sailed home that June with a cargo of supposedly precious minerals, leaving 104 colonists behind in Virginia.
Q 28The College of William & Mary, chartered in Virginia in 1693, is America's second-oldest college after which school?
Harvard
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.
Q 29Which present-day state began as a Virginia county created in 1776 and later joined the Union as the 15th state?
Kentucky
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.
Q 30Which neighboring colony was carved from Virginia's charter lands in 1632 as a haven for English Catholics?
Maryland
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.