9 Things Virginia Gave America That Nobody Credits It For
Ask someone what Virginia gave the country, and you’ll get crab cakes and maybe colonial homes.
That barely scratches the surface.
Virginia handed America its first elected government, and the rest of the country still hands Massachusetts the credit for it.
These are the things Virginia handed the rest of the country, then watched everyone forget where they came from.
1. America’s First Thanksgiving
Virginia held its own Thanksgiving nearly two years before Plymouth got the credit.
Captain John Woodlief led three dozen men off the ship Margaret at Berkeley Hundred, along the James River, in December 1619.
Their charter ordered a yearly day of thanks, not a one-time harvest meal.
Plymouth’s Pilgrims didn’t sit down to their now-famous feast until the fall of 1621, nearly two years later.
President John F. Kennedy’s own 1963 Thanksgiving proclamation named Virginia’s colonists in the same breath as Massachusetts’s.
Many schoolbooks never caught up.
2. First Elected Assembly
In 1619, Virginia gave America its first taste of picking its own lawmakers.
Twenty-two elected delegates from eleven Jamestown boroughs filed into the choir of the town church on July 30, 1619, and called themselves the House of Burgesses.
Every free adult man in the settlement got a vote.
That’s the first elected legislative body in English America, meeting more than 150 years before anyone wrote the word “Congress.”
Virginia’s new lawmakers argued about tobacco prices before they argued about much else.
That church-loft vote is the direct ancestor of Virginia’s legislature today.
3. First Religious Freedom Law
Virginia signed the country’s first law guaranteeing full religious freedom, years before the First Amendment existed.
Thomas Jefferson wrote Virginia’s Religious Freedom Statute in 1779, and James Madison carried it through the legislature while Jefferson served as America’s minister in Paris.
Virginia’s legislature passed it into law in January 1786.
The U.S. Supreme Court later cited the statute by name in its 1879 Reynolds v. United States ruling, calling it the definition of religious liberty in America.
Congress echoed the same protection five years after Virginia passed it, inside the First Amendment.
Virginia’s law came first.
4. Bill of Rights’ Roots
Virginia’s 1776 declaration is the rulebook the Bill of Rights borrowed from.
George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in the spring of 1776, and Virginia’s convention adopted it in June 1776, weeks before the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson leaned on Mason’s opening lines when he wrote that all men are created equal.
Article Nine of Mason’s declaration, banning cruel and unusual punishment, became the direct model for the Eighth Amendment.
One writer, two documents.
Mason wrote both inside the same year.
5. First College Fraternity
Virginia started the whole idea of the campus Greek-letter society.
Five students at the College of William & Mary founded Phi Beta Kappa inside the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg in December 1776.
They picked a Greek motto, a badge, and a secret handshake, the same basic playbook fraternities and sororities still use today.
The letters started in Virginia.
6. America’s First Law School
Virginia’s College of William & Mary trained the country’s first law students.
William & Mary created the nation’s first collegiate chair of law in December 1779, and put George Wythe in charge of it.
Wythe went on to teach Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay, three students who went on to shape the country’s courts and its politics both.
One Williamsburg law chair produced three careers that reshaped Washington.
7. America’s First Factory
Inside Virginia’s Jamestown fort sat the country’s first attempt at a factory.
German and Polish glassblowers built a glasshouse inside the fort in 1608, hoping to ship bottles and window glass back to England for profit.
Their glass never found a buyer back home.
The operation folded within a few years.
The idea outlived the business.
Virginia’s factory came and went fast, but it opened a door nobody in the colonies had tried before.
8. First Public Mental Hospital
Virginia opened the country’s first public hospital built only to treat mental illness.
The Public Hospital in Williamsburg admitted its first patients in October 1773, decades before many parts of the country had any dedicated place for people in crisis.
Somewhere had to go first.
The building still stands in Colonial Williamsburg today, restored as a museum on the very same ground.
Colonial Williamsburg keeps it open to visitors year-round, under its original name, the Public Hospital.
9. Original Ballpark Peanut
Virginia grows the peanut sitting in the bag at the ballpark.
Farmers planted the first commercial peanut crop near Waverly, in Sussex County, in 1842, and the sandy soil there grew a bigger, crunchier peanut than anywhere else in the country.
That Virginia-type peanut still makes up roughly 15% of the peanuts grown nationwide.
Stadiums nationwide still call it the Ballpark Peanut, and it’s the same jumbo variety Virginia has grown since the 1840s.
One peanut, every stadium.
Psst! How much do you know about Virginia’s other historic firsts? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Virginia Firsts IQ
Answer these questions on Virginia’s other historic firsts. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Three days before English colonists reached Jamestown in 1607, where did their ships first come ashore?
Mother of Presidents
More presidents have been born in Virginia than any other state in the country.
Eight presidents were born within Virginia's borders, including four of the first five men to hold the office.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all came first, and Woodrow Wilson closed out the list in 1913.
Ohio comes closest, and it still falls one short.
Eight, not seven.
Fresh, raw Virginia peanuts still come boiled, roasted, or dropped straight into a bottle of Coca-Cola, a combination Southerners swear by and everyone else tries once out of curiosity.
Suffolk still calls itself the Peanut Capital of the World, and every ballpark bag sold from Fenway to Dodger Stadium traces back to that same Virginia soil.
The Math Behind Virginia's Presidents
Virginia's presidential count runs by birthplace, not by the state a president called home in office.
Ohio makes a similar claim with seven presidents born there, one shy of Virginia's eight.
That one-president gap is why Virginia and Ohio both claim the nickname "Mother of Presidents."
9 Ways Virginians Keep Ticks Out of Their Yard Before Fall
Virginia's tick season doesn't wind down once the kids head back to school.
Virginia Cooperative Extension researchers say adult blacklegged ticks stay active clear into winter, right as many homeowners put the bug spray away for the year.
9 Ways Virginians Keep Ticks Out of Their Yard Before Fall
12 Home Repairs Virginians Are Told They Need That Rarely Matter
A home inspector in Lynchburg once ran a flashlight down a thin crack in a Virginia basement wall and wrote one line about it.
By the weekend, three companies had called about that same crack, and two used the word "structural" before anyone measured a thing.
12 Home Repairs Virginians Are Told They Need That Rarely Matter
