Virtual Tour: 1600s English Farm

English colonization of North America began with the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Over the next century other English colonies were established along the Atlantic coast of what would become the United States. By 1700, almost 250,000 people, most of whom were born in England or were of English descent, lived in the colonies. Virginia was England’s first North American colony, and as many as 120,000 English migrants arrived here in the 1600s. Some colonists were granted land where they established tobacco plantations worked by white indentured servants and African slaves. Settlement slowly crept westward into the piedmont, and by the mid-1700s Anglo-Virginians crossed the Blue Ridge and began to settle in the Valley of Virginia.