Virginia

In 1607, 100 English settlers arrived in what is now Virginia to find a robust realm of Native American tribes. They founded their own fort on the southern shore, later known as Jamestown.

While the colony prospered on tobacco farming, with indentured servants and enslaved Africans sustaining the economy, its Native American ranks were devastated by a “war of extermination” that reduced their numbers from 20,000 to 3,000. Later, as the colony flourished, descendants of those settlers started planning their own independence from England.

After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union, on April 17, 1861. In the following days, Union Army forces crossed the Potomac River to seize Alexandria, a slave port at the time, to prevent the Confederate Army from having a base so close to Washington.

The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia that signaled the end of the war was signed at the courthouse in Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

Following the Civil War, Virginia remained generally rural and resisted social changes. The state Legislature enacted a Racial Integrity Act in 1924 barring marriages of “whites” and “coloreds.” In the case of Loving vs. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the state’s interracial marriage ban in 1967.

Virginia still possesses its own North-South divide, with the rural, mountainous reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains and southwestern valleys and southeastern Tidewater region offsetting the sprawling suburban Washington, D.C., corridor of the northeastern counties.

Virginia’s economy is as diverse as the shipbuilding on the southern shore, the farming and tobacco-growing of rural areas, seafood harvesting along the Atlantic coast and rivers, the apple-growing capital of Winchester in the northwest, wineries spread among the countryside and the technology companies of the suburban Washington corridor.