Elizabeth City: Virginia's Oldest Corporation

The land where Hampton, Virginia stands today was one of four original corporations of colonial America, established in sixteen nineteen, one year before the Mayflower sailed.

The Virginia Company reorganized its Virginia settlements that year, converting the earlier territory of Kecoughtan, a Powhatan village the English had seized, into a formal English corporation named Elizabeth City, in honor of King James the First's daughter Elizabeth, the Queen of Bohemia. Delegates from the new corporation attended the very first meeting of a representative assembly in the Americas, at Jamestown on July thirtieth, sixteen nineteen.

In sixteen thirty-four, Virginia reorganized into counties, and Elizabeth City became a county. In seventeen oh five, the town of Hampton was formally established within it. The continuous settlement here makes the Hampton area one of the oldest English-speaking communities in the United States, predating Plymouth by about a decade.