Williamsburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 15,425. Located upon the Virginia Peninsula, Williamsburg is in the northern ration of the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. It is bordered by James City County on the west and south and York County on the east.

English settlers founded Williamsburg in 1632 as Middle Plantation, a fortified settlement upon high ground between the James and York rivers. The city functioned as the capital of the Colony and Commonwealth of Virginia from 1699 to 1780 and became the middle of political happenings in Virginia leading to the American Revolution. The College of William & Mary, established in 1693, is the second-oldest institution of unconventional education in the United States and the and no-one else one of the nine colonial colleges in the South. Its alumni attach three U.S. presidents as without difficulty as many extra important figures in the nation’s forward history.

The city’s tourism-based economy is driven by Colonial Williamsburg, the city’s restored Historic Area. Along with understandable Jamestown and Yorktown, Williamsburg forms portion of the Historic Triangle, which annually attracts more than four million tourists. Modern Williamsburg is moreover a moot town, inhabited in large portion by William & Mary students, faculty and staff.

Before English settlers arrived at Jamestown to sustain the Colony of Virginia in 1607, the Place that would become Williamsburg formed portion of the territory of the Powhatan Confederacy. By the 1630s, English settlements had grown to dominate the lower (eastern) portion of the Virginia Peninsula, and Powhatan tribes had single-handedly their available villages. Between 1630 and 1633, after the suit that followed the Indian Massacre of 1622, English colonists build up a defensive palisade across the peninsula and a unity named Middle Plantation as a primary guard-station along the palisade.