VIRGINIA

constituent state of the United States of America, one of the original 13 colonies. It has an area of 40,767 square miles (105,587 square kilometres). It is bordered by Maryland to the northeast, North Carolina and Tennessee to the south, Kentucky to the west, and West Virginia to the northwest. The state capital is Richmond. Virginia was nicknamed the Old Dominion for its loyalty to the exiled Charles II of England during the Puritan Commonwealth. It has one of the longest continuous histories among the American states, dating from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. It was named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and under its original charter was granted most of the unexplored lands west of the Atlantic seaboard settlements, to the Mississippi River and beyond. The contributions of such Virginians as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were crucial in the formation of the American nation, and in the early decades of the republic the state was known as the Birthplace of Presidents. Although Virginia gave its supportincluding the leadership of Robert E. Lee and other generalsto the Confederacy during the Civil War, it has developed in the 20th century into a bridge state between the North and the South. Its northern counties reflect the cosmopolitan character of the national capital, Washington, D.C., which lies across the Potomac River to the north. Other areas of the state retain the tinge of conservatism developed over centuries of agricultural life and through aristocratic traditions that made the term a Virginia gentleman synonymous with gentility and refinement. History and nature make Virginia a leading tourist centre. Within its borders lie many important historical monuments. They include colonial restorations and reconstructions, such as those at Williamsburg; the homes of Washington, Jefferson, and other noted Virginians; and many of the battlefields of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Although it is becoming increasingly an industrialized and urbanized state, slightly more than three-fifths of Virginia's land remains under forest cover as it descends from the mountains and valleys in the west to the beaches of the Atlantic shore. The Upper South. constituent state of the United States of America, on the central Atlantic seaboard. It is bounded on the northwest by West Virginia, on the northeast by Maryland, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by North Carolina and Tennessee, and on the west by Kentucky. The capital is Richmond. Virginia was Great Britain's first American colony, founded in 1607 at Jamestown. The colony faltered at first, but by 1619 it had its own representative assembly and a growing tobacco industry. Virginia grew rapidly during the 18th century and on the eve of the American Revolution was the largest of the 13 Colonies. Its citizens were among the leaders of the American Revolutionary period and contributed four of the country's first five presidents, but they hesitated to ratify the Constitution (June 1788) and were early exponents of states' rights and nullification. Virginia was the scene of Nat Turner's slave insurrection of 1831, and, as agriculture declined, it became known for slave breeding. It wavered on secession until President Abraham Lincoln issued the call for volunteers, but the western part of the state refused to secede and split off to become West Virginia in 1863. Virginia, whose own capital of Richmond was also the capital of the Confederacy, bore the brunt of military action during the war. Already in economic difficulty before the American Civil War, the state was plagued by the war's devastation for decades. Only after World War I was Virginia able to achieve basic financial reforms and begin agricultural diversification and industrial development. Virginia is divided into three physiographic regions. The Coastal Plain, also known as the Tidewater, lies east of the fall line; major rivers separate the Northern Neck Peninsula, the Middle Peninsula, and The Peninsula, all west of Chesapeake Bay, and across the bay lies the Eastern Shore area on the Delmarva Peninsula. The Piedmont of middle Virginia is a region of rolling hills extending westward to the Blue Ridge. The mountain region of the west is made up of the Appalachian Plateau, the Ridge and Valley Province, and the Blue Ridge. The state's climate is generally mild and equable but varies according to elevation and proximity to Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. In the southeast, winter temperatures rarely go below 15 F (-9 C), or in summer above 100 F (38 C). In the mountains, winter temperatures of 0 F (-18 C) may occur, but cool nights in summer follow daytime highs that usually stay below 90 F (32 C). Rainfall averages from about 32 to 48 inches (810 to 1,200 mm) yearly. Most of eastern Virginia was first settled by the English. During the 1700s, the Welsh, together with French Huguenots, were the prominent immigrants, and a large number of people of Scots-Irish and German descent moved into the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania. Black slaves were the foundation of the state's plantation agriculture and at the start of the Civil War comprised about half of the state's population, but the proportion of blacks thereafter declined steadily to about one-fifth of the population in the late 20th century. More than two-thirds of Virginia's population is in urban areas, mostly in suburban Washington, D.C., and in a corridor connecting Washington to Richmond and Norfolk. The population was growing faster than the national average in the late 20th century, largely because of substantial net in-migration, most of it to the metropolitan areas. The federal government is Virginia's largest employer. Income derived from military installations alone is considerable. Manufacturing is the second largest employer, with chemicals and allied products the major items of manufacture followed by food processing, tobacco products, textiles, and apparel. Agriculture is no longer dominated by tobacco. Truck farms, whose products include milk, cheese, and vegetables, dot the eastern shore. Apple and peach orchards are found in the northwest. Pine timber is the main forest product. Extracted nonmetals include coal, stone, clay, sand, and gravel. Virginia's port of Hampton Roads is one of the nation's leading ports in foreign-trade-tonnage handled. Primary and secondary roads of more than 65,000 miles (105,000 km) comprise the nation's third largest state-maintained system. Most traffic is northsouth, adding to Virginia's status as a bridge state. There is a dense network of railway track that includes Amtrak passenger service. Washington's two major airports are located in Virginia. There is a state Commission of the Arts and Humanities, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond was established in 1934. Historical sites abound and include Colonial Williamsburg, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the Civil War battlefields of Bull Run and Appomattox, and General Robert E. Lee's house, now in Arlington National Cemetery. The College of William and Mary (founded in 1693) is the country's second oldest college. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville was largely the creation of Thomas Jefferson. Area 40,767 square miles (105,586 square km). Pop. (1990) 6,187,358. city, St. Louis county, northeastern Minnesota, U.S., in the Mesabi Range region. First a lumbering town, it developed as a mining centre after 1890, when Leonidas Merritt and his five brothers discovered rich iron-ore deposits. It was laid out in 1892 and named for the home state of the development company's president. Although hematite iron-ore reserves diminished, taconite remains in great quantities and since World War II the production of taconite pellets has become significant. Mesabi Community College was founded in 1918. Lookout Mountain Ski Area and the southern fringe of Superior National Forest are immediately north, making tourism an economic asset. Inc. 1894. Pop. (1990) 9,410. town and gold-mining centre, north-central Free State province, South Africa, in one of the world's richest goldfields. Virginia was a former whistle stop (named, 1892) on the line between Johannesburg and Cape Town. A modern, well-planned town, it was founded in 1954, after gold was discovered in the vicinity. Mining, gold-extraction plants, and processing plants recovering uranium and sulfuric acid as a by-product from gold ore form the basis of the economy. Pop. (1985) 17,624. Additional reading Introductions to the state are provided by Federal Writers' Project, Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (1940, reissued 1974), still worth consulting; and Jean Gottman, Virginia in Our Century (1969), a comprehensive analysis through 1968. DeLorme Mapping Company, Virginia Atlas & Gazetteer, 3rd ed. (1999), contains topographic maps. Local geography and history are combined in Raus McDill Hanson, Virginia Place Names (1969); and James Hagemann, The Heritage of Virginia: The Story of Place Names in the Old Dominion (1986). Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), analyzes the social basis of early Virginian political thought; while J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 19451966 (1968), recounts more recent events. Ben C. McCary, Indians in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (1957, reprinted 1983), briefly discusses the tribes of Native Americans, their numbers, and their culture at that time. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Virginia (1977, reissued 1984), provides an overview. Various periods in the state's past are described in Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vol. (1960); Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (1986); Virginius Dabney, Virginia, the New Dominion (1971, reprinted 1983); Parke Rouse, Virginia: The English Heritage in America (1966), on the period before the Civil War, with a short epilogue that gives a contemporary assessment of the state; and A.W. Moger, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 18701925 (1968). Scholarly articles on Virginia's history are printed in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (quarterly). Charles Loreaux Quittmeyer The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica