Petersburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 33,458. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines Petersburg (along similar to the city of Colonial Heights) with Dinwiddie County for statistical purposes. The city is 21 miles (34 km) south of the commonwealth (state) capital city of Richmond.

It is located at the slip line (the head of navigation of rivers on the U.S. East Coast) of the Appomattox River (a tributary of the longer larger James River which flows east to meet the southern mouth of the Chesapeake Bay at the Hampton Roads port and the Atlantic Ocean). In 1645, the Virginia House of Burgesses ordered Fort Henry built, which attracted both traders and settlers to the area. The Town of Petersburg, chartered by the Virginia legislature in 1784, incorporated three yet to be settlements, and in 1850 the legislature elevated it to city status.

Petersburg grew as a transportation hub and after that developed industry. It was the pure destination upon the Upper Appomattox Canal Navigation System, which opened in 1816, to a city mostly rebuilt after a devastating 1815 fire. When its Appomattox River harbor silted up, investors built an 8-mile railroad to City Point on the James River, which opened in 1838 (and was acquired by the city and renamed the Appomattox Railroad in 1847). As discussed below, that became one of four railroads built (some with dealing out subsidies) constructed (with not speaking terminals to the advantage of local freight haulers) before the American Civil War. In 1860, the city’s industries and transportation whole to make it the state’s second largest city (after Richmond). It united commerce as far away inland as Farmville, Virginia at the foothills of the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains chain, to shipping further east into the Chesapeake Bay and North Atlantic Ocean.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), because of this railroad network, Petersburg became indispensable to Union plans to seize the Confederate States national capital received early in the raid at Richmond. The 1864–65 Siege of Petersburg, which included the Battle of the Crater and nine months of trench battle devastated the city. Battlefield sites are partly preserved as Petersburg National Battlefield by the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Petersburg rebuilt its railroads, including a connecting terminal by 1866, although it never quite regained its economic outlook because much shipping traffic would continue to the Norfolk seaport. After the consolidations of smaller railroads, both the CSX and Norfolk Southern railway networks facilitate Petersburg.

Petersburg has the oldest release black settlements in the state at Pocahontas Island. Two Baptist churches in the city, whose congregations were founded in the late 18th century, are in the course of the oldest black congregations and churches in the United States. In the 20th century, these and extra black churches were leaders in the national Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s. In the post-bellum period, a historically black literary which cutting edge developed as the Virginia State University was received nearby in Ettrick in Chesterfield County. Richard Bland College, now a junior college, was originally acknowledged here as a branch of Williamsburg’s famed College of William and Mary.