How 3 Colonial Towns Shaped the Course of US History

It’s where English colonization of America began—and where it effectively ended. It’s where representative government in America was first established and where the Revolutionary War reached its climax. All this history unfolded within a single 20-mile stretch of Virginia’s Tidewater region.

From England’s first permanent North American settlement at Jamestown to the colonial capital of Williamsburg to the American Revolution’s decisive battleground at Yorktown, America’s Historic Triangle witnessed seminal moments in how the United States was founded, governed and ultimately born.

Following an arduous five-month journey from London, some 100 men and boys disembarked on a marshy peninsula 50 miles up the James River on May 14, 1607, and began the Jamestown colony.

“Jamestown represents the beginning of American society as it exists today,” says Jamestown Settlement senior curator Beverly Straube. “It is the site of England’s first successful transatlantic settlement that established English social, political and economic norms in what grew to become the United States of America.”

Members of the Virginia Company of London, the settlers came in search of silver, gold and a waterborne trade route to the Orient. Within months, however, they shifted from dreaming of riches to praying for survival. By the end of 1607, all but 38 had died from hunger, disease and attacks by the Indigenous Powhatan people. Supply ships brought additional settlers, but after a 1609 hurricane blew a convoy off course, the ensuing harsh winter and Powhatan siege led to “The Starving Time” in which settlers survived by eating dogs, shoe leather and, evidence suggests, even each other.

The new colony nearly withered before it could take root. Jamestown teetered on collapse when two ships carrying supplies and at least 150 new settlers arrived in the spring of 1610. Cultivation of tobacco eventually made Jamestown economically viable along with a corporate pivot.

“The Virginia Company shifted its focus from the drive from immediate profit to the realization that land was their most valuable resource in Virginia and began issuing land grants to settlers,” Straube says. “This attracted more colonists and contributed to long-term settlement.”

Two American institutions—democracy and slavery—spread from Jamestown. Following years of military rule, a General Assembly of 22 representatives directly elected by Virginia’s male landowners met inside a Jamestown church on July 30, 1619. Colonial America’s first democratically elected legislative body, which evolved into the House of Burgesses, served as a model of representative government for future American colonies.

Only weeks later, English privateers arrived with at least 20 captives taken from modern-day Angola and an intercepted Portuguese slave ship bound for Mexico. They were sold into bondage, among the first of millions enslaved in America over the ensuing centuries.

Jamestown was all but abandoned after its central storehouse burned down in 1698, forcing the colonial capital’s move to an adjacent settlement.

Five miles inland from Jamestown, Williamsburg presented a more easily defensible location for the capital of America’s largest colony. Known as Middle Plantation after its 1632 founding, the settlement was rechristened in honor of King William III in 1699 as it grew in wealth and political power.

After the passage of the 1765 Stamp Act, Virginia’s capital kindled the growing rebellion against British taxation policies. Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson honed their political skills in the House of Burgesses, which adopted Patrick Henry’s resolutions challenging the Stamp Act and the British Parliament’s authority. “Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act resolves were pretty radical for the time, basically saying that Britain didn’t have the right to tax the colonies,” says Cathy Hellier, senior historian at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Following the Boston Tea Party, the House of Burgesses passed a May 1774 resolution protesting the Coercive Acts subsequently imposed by Britain. When Virginia’s royal governor, the Earl of Dunmore, responded by dissolving the legislature, delegates reconvened extralegally at secret locations around Williamsburg, such as the Raleigh Tavern. They then formed the Virginia Convention to boycott British goods and to elect delegates to the First Continental Congress.

Dunmore further inflamed patriotic fervor in April 1775 after ordering the confiscation of public gunpowder from the city’s magazine. “This is Virginia’s Lexington and Concord where British forces are trying to secure the colony’s gunpowder and essentially render Virginians more defenseless,” Hellier says. “Lord Dunmore threatens to reduce Williamsburg to ashes if anybody injures him or his people.”

Although Dunmore reimbursed the rebels for the cost of gunpowder, the patriotic backlash proved so intense it forced the governor to flee to a British ship anchored offshore, never to return. Following the Declaration of Independence, Virginia’s new state government convened in Williamsburg until it moved to a safer, more central location in Richmond in 1780. The following year, skirmishes between the patriots and British troops erupted on Williamsburg’s outskirts, and the war’s climactic blow would be levied just 13 miles away.

In the summer of 1781, British General Lord Charles Cornwallis directed his depleted 9,000-man army to the tobacco port of Yorktown, where he awaited desperately needed supplies and 5,000 reinforcements expected to arrive by sea from New York City. Seeing a chance to trap Cornwallis, Washington and Lt. General Comte de Rochambeau ordered 8,000 American and French soldiers to march from an encampment north of New York City in the largest troop movement of the American Revolution.

Once a French fleet guarding the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay defeated the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Capes on September 5, Cornwallis found himself isolated. After marching for weeks, the Continental Army linked up with 12,000 additional militia and French troops and began a three-week siege of Yorktown.

With Washington himself firing the first cannon shot, the patriots launched a nonstop barrage on October 9. Five days later, Alexander Hamilton led 400 light infantry armed with only bayonets on a daring raid that seized one of the Redcoats’ 10 redoubts, while French forces simultaneously captured a second fortified position.

A cornered Cornwallis had no choice but to surrender on October 19. While the story that a British band played “The World’s Turned Upside Down” during the surrender is likely apocryphal, the decisive engagement at Yorktown certainly upended global politics. When news of the battle reached London, British Prime Minister Frederick North, Lord North exclaimed, “Oh God, it is all over!” With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September 1783, Britain formally recognized the independence of its 13 former American colonies.

Through the work of preservationists and philanthropists, the past remains very much alive at America’s Historic Triangle. After a 1926 meeting in which Reverend William Archer Rutherford Goodwin shared his vision of restoring Williamsburg to its colonial-era appearance, American financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. started to secretly bankroll the purchase of run-down, period properties that were restored to their 18th-century grandeur.

Today, Colonial Williamsburg visitors require little imagination to step back in time as historical interpreters in period dress emulate daily life amid a collection of original and reconstructed buildings. America’s Historic Triangle features additional living history museums at Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown as well as the archaeological site at Historic Jamestowne and the Yorktown Battlefield.