VAVirginia Fun Facts

Eight American presidents were born in Virginia, more than in any other state, and four of the first five grew up within a hundred miles of Richmond. The state that produced most of the founding generation now runs on something less photogenic: Loudoun County, in the northern suburbs, holds the densest cluster of data centers on the planet, and an enormous share of the world's internet traffic crosses the state before it reaches anyone.

Facts most people get wrong

• Plymouth was not the first English settlement. Jamestown was founded in May 1607, thirteen years before the Mayflower reached Massachusetts. It was the first permanent English settlement in North America and served as Virginia's capital until the government moved to Williamsburg in 1699.
• The Pentagon is not in Washington DC. It stands in Arlington, Virginia, on the far bank of the Potomac. Built between September 1941 and January 1943, it is still the largest office building in the world by floor area, with roughly 6.5 million square feet and about 17.5 miles of corridors.
• Calling itself a commonwealth changes nothing. Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania all use the word. It is a seventeenth century phrase about government for the common good, and in federal law a commonwealth is a state like every other state.
• Richmond is not the biggest city. Richmond is the capital, but Virginia Beach has roughly twice the population, and Chesapeake and Norfolk are larger too.
• Arlington National Cemetery started as a seizure. The estate belonged to the family of Mary Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee. The federal government took it during the Civil War over an unpaid tax and began burying soldiers beside the house. The Supreme Court ruled the seizure unlawful in 1882, and Congress bought the land from Lee's son for $150,000 the following year.
• West Virginia did not simply walk out. The Constitution bars carving a new state from an existing one without that state's consent, so the Union recognized the pro-Union government meeting at Wheeling as the legitimate government of Virginia, and it duly consented to its own division.

Records and firsts

• The House of Burgesses met at Jamestown in July 1619, the first representative legislative assembly in English America. Its descendant, the General Assembly, is the oldest continuous law making body in the Western Hemisphere.
• Eight presidents were born in Virginia: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Taylor and Wilson. No other state has produced more.
• Virginia ratified the Constitution on June 25, 1788, becoming the tenth state, arriving after the nine ratifications needed to put the new government into effect.
• The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel opened in 1964 and runs 17.6 miles across the mouth of the bay, dipping into two mile long tunnels so ships can pass overhead.
• The Great Stalacpipe Organ at Luray Caverns, finished in 1956, strikes tuned stalactites spread across about 3.5 acres of cave and is the largest musical instrument in the world.
• "Virginia is for Lovers" was written in 1969 and remains one of the longest running tourism slogans in the country.
• Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, ending the war in the state that had hosted more Civil War battles than any other.

Geography that surprises

• Virginia has 38 independent cities, municipalities that belong to no county at all. That is nearly every independent city in the United States.
• Maryland owns the Potomac. The 1632 Maryland charter granted the whole river, so Virginia's northern boundary runs along the low water mark on the Virginia bank rather than down the middle of the channel.
• Two Virginia counties sit on the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, cut off from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay and reachable by road only through Maryland or across the bridge tunnel.
• The far southwestern tip of the state, in Lee County, lies west of Detroit.
• Mount Rogers reaches 5,729 feet in the southwest while the eastern edge sits at sea level, with roughly 430 miles between them.

Where the name comes from

Virginia honors Elizabeth I, the queen who never married and was known as the Virgin Queen. Sir Walter Raleigh applied the name in 1584 to the entire English claim on the Atlantic coast, which on paper stretched from Spanish Florida into Canada. Everything from Maine to the Carolinas was Virginia before it was anything else.

Old Dominion came later. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, the colony's loyalty to the crown during the English Civil War earned it the standing of a dominion, ranked in royal usage alongside England, Scotland, Ireland and France. The state motto, adopted in 1776, is Sic semper tyrannis, thus always to tyrants.

State basics

Bordering states

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