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Virginia is one of the original Thirteen Colonies that were settled by the British. The first permanent English settlement in America, Jamestown, was established in 1607 along the James River. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia

About 25 years later, the area which would become Williamsburg was settled several miles from Jamestown. Colonial Williamsburg became the center of government, education and culture in the Virginia colony. It is now an excellent example of a living history museum, an open-air assemblage of buildings populated with historical reenactors whose job it is to explain and demonstrate aspects of daily life in the past; they work, dress, and talk as they would have in colonial times. Some of the missing Colonial structures were recreated on their original sites during the 1930s; many others were restored to the best estimates of how they would have looked during the eighteenth century. Most buildings are open for tourists to look through. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Williamsburg

Monticello, located near Charlottesville Virginia, was the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States. The house is of Jefferson's own design and is situated on the summit of an 850-foot-high peak. Thomas Jefferson was a true Renaissance man, achieving distinction as an horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor, and the founder of the University of Virginia, among other roles. When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."