Nomadic hunters are estimated to have arrived in Virginia around 17,000 years ago. Evidence from Daugherty's Cave in Russell County shows it was regularly used as a rock shelter by 9,800 years ago.

During the late Woodland period (500–1000 CE), tribes coalesced, and farming, first of corn and squash, began, with beans and tobacco arriving from the southwest and Mexico by the end of the period. Palisaded towns began to be built around 1200, and the native population in the current boundaries of Virginia reached around 50,000 in the 1500s. Large groups in the area at that time included the Algonquian in the Tidewater region, which they referred to as Tsenacommacah, the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway and Meherrin to the north and south, and the Tutelo, who spoke Siouan, to the west.

In response to threats from these other groups to their trade network, thirty or so Virginia Algonquian-speaking tribes consolidated during the 1570s under Wahunsenacawh, known in English as Chief Powhatan.

Powhatan controlled more than 150 settlements that had a total population of around 15,000 in 1607. Three-fourths of the native population in Virginia, however, died from smallpox and other Old-World diseases during that century, disrupting their oral traditions and complicating research into earlier periods. Additionally, many primary sources, including those that mention Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, were created by Europeans, who may have held biases or misunderstood native social structures and customs.

Pocahontas saving the life of Capt. John Smith

In 1607, the London Company established the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent English colony in the New World. Virginia's state nickname, the Old Dominion, is a reference to this status. 100 English settlers arrived in what is now Virginia to find a robust realm of Native American tribes. They founded their own fort on the southern shore, later known as Jamestown. Slave labor and land from displaced native tribes fueled the growing plantation economy, but also fueled conflicts both inside and outside the colony.

Virginia was one of the original Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution, during which several key battles were fought there.

More major battles were fought in Virginia during the American Civil War, which split the state as the government in Richmond joined the Confederacy, but many northwestern counties remained loyal to the Union and separated as the state of West Virginia in 1863. Although the state was under one-party rule for nearly a century following the Reconstruction era, both major political parties are competitive in modern Virginia.

While the colony prospered on tobacco farming,

with indentured servants and enslaved Africans sustaining the economy, its Native American ranks were devastated by a “war of extermination” that reduced their numbers from 20,000 to 3,000. Later, descendants of those settlers started planning their own independence from England.

After the election of President Abraham Lincoln, Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union, on April 17, 1861. In the following days, Union Army forces crossed the Potomac River to seize Alexandria,

a slave port at the time, to prevent the Confederate Army from having a base so close to Washington.

The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia that signaled the end of the war was signed at the courthouse in Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant

Following the Civil War, Virginia remained generally rural and resisted social changes. The state Legislature enacted a Racial Integrity Act in 1924 barring marriages of “whites” and “coloreds.” In the case of Loving vs. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the state’s interracial marriage ban in 1967.

Virginia still possesses its own North-South divide, with the rural, mountainous reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains and southwestern valleys and southeastern Tidewater region counterbalanced by the sprawling suburban Washington, D.C., corridor of the northeastern counties.