Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America, established in 1607.
The Virginia Company founded Jamestown on an island in the James River in what is now Virginia. The settlement was named for King James I and became the capital of the Virginia Colony. Its location was defensible and accessible by water, but the marshy environment brought disease, difficult conditions, and food shortages.
Jamestown survived through a combination of Indigenous trade, strict company policies, resupply, and later tobacco cultivation. The Powhatan Confederacy, led by Wahunsenacawh, played a major role in the surrounding political and economic environment. Pocahontas, his daughter, became associated with the settlement through later English accounts.
The colony established the first representative legislative assembly in English America in 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses. Jamestown was abandoned as Virginia’s capital in 1699, when the capital moved to Williamsburg, but its archaeological site remains a major landmark of early American history.