Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the area that became the United States. English colonists established it in Virginia in 1607 on an island in the James River.
The settlement was founded by the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock company chartered by King James I. The colonists arrived in May 1607 and built a fortified settlement that they named Jamestown in honor of the king.
Jamestown faced disease, hunger, conflict, and difficult relations with the Powhatan Confederacy. The colony survived partly through trade and through the cultivation and export of tobacco, especially after John Rolfe developed a commercially successful strain in the early 17th century.
Jamestown is often confused with Plymouth, founded by English Pilgrims in 1620. St. Augustine, founded by Spain in 1565, predates Jamestown as a permanent European settlement in what is now the United States, but it was not English. Roanoke was an earlier English attempt whose settlers disappeared.