Statehouse Foundations

The Virginia General Assembly, the oldest representative legislature in the Western Hemisphere, first met in July 1619 in the choir of Jamestown’s church and developed over the seventeenth century as both the assembly and its meeting places grew. In 1643, it divided into two bodies, the Council of State, appointed by the King, and the House of Burgesses, whose members were elected by voters from Jamestown and counties across the colony. This bicameral government reached its height in the 1660s and 1670s, but after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 the assembly lost much of its independence, even as generations of colonists had already gained important experience in self-government. Jamestown’s church served as the first informal statehouse into the 1630s, after which the government met in several governors’ private homes until the 1660s. In 1665, the General Assembly convened in the first building constructed specifically for the colony’s growing government, and the foundations of that statehouse lie below the Archaearium.

Virginia · United States