Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America.
The Virginia Company established Jamestown in 1607 on an island in the James River. The settlement became the capital of the Virginia Colony and remained so until 1699, when the capital moved to Williamsburg. Jamestown’s survival was difficult because of disease, hunger, conflict, and poor relations with nearby Indigenous peoples.
Jamestown is often confused with Roanoke, an earlier English colony that disappeared, and Plymouth, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620. St. Augustine, founded by Spain in 1565, predates Jamestown as a permanent European settlement in what became the United States, but it was not English. Jamestown’s representative assembly, the House of Burgesses, first met in 1619.