Virginia became the first permanent English settlement in the future United States through Jamestown, established in 1607.
The London Virginia Company founded Jamestown on May 14, 1607, near Chesapeake Bay. The settlement struggled with disease, hunger, conflict, and difficult relations with nearby Indigenous communities, but it survived and developed into the Colony of Virginia.
Tobacco cultivation later transformed Virginia’s economy. John Rolfe’s cultivation of a marketable tobacco crop helped make the colony financially viable and encouraged further English settlement. Virginia’s political institutions also influenced the later development of colonial self-government.
Virginia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that declared independence in 1776. It is important to distinguish the first permanent English settlement from earlier failed attempts, such as Roanoke, and from St. Augustine, founded by Spain in 1565. The question concerns the first permanent English colony, not the earliest European settlement anywhere in what became the United States.