Jamestown Founded in Virginia
104 English men and boys land on a Virginia riverbank and found the first permanent English settlement in the Americas
Quick facts
- Region
- Virginia, on the James River
- Sponsor
- Virginia Company of London
- Original settlers
- 104 men and boys
- Turning point
- Tobacco cultivation from 1612 made the colony commercially viable
What happened
Three ships financed by the Virginia Company of London, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, carried 104 English men and boys across the Atlantic, departing in December 1606. On 13 to 14 May 1607 they landed on a peninsula in the James River, sixty miles from the Chesapeake Bay, and named the settlement Jamestown after King James I. The site offered a deep-water harbour but poor soil and swampy, disease-ridden ground. Starvation, disease, and conflict with the Powhatan people killed most of the original settlers within the first years, and the colony survived only after John Rolfe introduced tobacco as a cash crop from 1612. It remained Virginia's capital until 1699.
Why it matters
Jamestown was the seed from which English, and later British, settlement of North America grew, and with it the plantation economy, indentured servitude, and, from 1619, the introduction of enslaved Africans into English colonial society.
How we know
The site is preserved and excavated as Historic Jamestowne under the U.S. National Park Service and Preservation Virginia, whose ongoing archaeology has recovered the original fort's palisade lines and thousands of period artifacts.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Jamestown Colony of Virginia · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Historic Jamestowne, U.S. National Park Service. A Short History of Jamestown · Reputable sourcenps.gov · The domain "nps.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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