Chesterfield County split from Henrico County on May 25, 1749, and was named for Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, an English politician then famous for his polished writings and impeccable manners. The Earl never visited. He probably never thought about the place much at all. But his name traveled - first to the county, then a century and a half later to Chesterfield Cigarettes, which adopted it because the company's tobacco was grown nearby. Before any of that, there had been Henricus, founded in 1611 under Sir Thomas Dale on a neck of land later called Farrars Island - a 5,000-acre site with seven miles of James River shoreline, protected by a palisade across the 174-yard-wide neck. Henricus had three streets, a church, a hospital, a college planned to educate both English children and Virginia Indians. In 1622, in the Powhatan uprising led by Opechancanough, the settlement was destroyed and the ironworks at Falling Creek with it. Neither was rebuilt for generations.

Around 1701, French Huguenot refugees in the Midlothian area found coal seams running through the Piedmont. By 1709, William Byrd II was writing in his diary that "the coaler found the coal mine very good and sufficient to furnish several generations." The estimate was correct. Commercial mining began in the 1730s, and the coal fueled the cannon-making at Westham during the Revolution. The challenge was always transport: how to get the coal from the mines around Midlothian down to the docks at Manchester, across the James from Richmond. The answer came in 1831 with the Chesterfield Railroad - the first railroad in Virginia. It ran by gravity going down (laden with coal) and was pulled back up by mules. The Wooldridge brothers, who ran one of the mining companies, had named their venture Mid-Lothian after the East and West Lothian regions in Scotland they had emigrated from. The community name came from the company. By the 1850s, the Richmond and Danville Railroad had absorbed the Chesterfield line's traffic, and the older railroad went out of business.

During the Civil War, Chesterfield's geography turned strategic again. Drewry's Bluff on the James became the key defensive point blocking Union gunboats from steaming up the river to Richmond. During the Siege of Petersburg (1864-1865), a long line of trenches and earthworks ran through the county - part of the Richmond-Petersburg defensive line. When Petersburg fell in April 1865, Richmond's fall followed within days. After the war, a normal school founded by the state to educate freed Black men eventually became Virginia State University, in the Ettrick area near Petersburg and Colonial Heights. Reconstruction-era Chesterfield used convict labor to build roads starting in 1878, a practice that would persist for decades and that disproportionately conscripted Black Virginians into forced labor under the legal fiction of a sentence.

Chesterfield's twentieth century included one of the most consequential annexation fights in Virginia history. The City of Richmond had been chipping away at the county for decades when, in 1969, the so-called Horner-Bagley Compromise transferred 23 square miles - including 47,262 residents, mostly white - from Chesterfield to Richmond. Some Black Richmonders objected: the annexation diluted the Black share of the city's electorate from 52 percent to 42 percent, and they argued in federal court that this violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They won. The court ordered Richmond to abandon its at-large city council elections and create a nine-ward system, ensuring four predominantly Black wards. The case became a national landmark in voting rights enforcement. Many of the annexed residents themselves had opposed the move and fought for seven years to have it reversed. Some called their tract "Occupied Chesterfield." The schools transferred to Richmond - Huguenot High, Fred D. Thompson Middle, Elkhardt Middle, and eight elementary schools - were ordered into citywide desegregation busing in 1971.

In 2024, Commonwealth Fusion Systems - a Massachusetts startup spun out of MIT research - announced plans to build the world's first grid-scale commercial fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Center in Chesterfield County. The county approved the conditional use permit in 2025. The site is being prepared to host ARC, a tokamak-class reactor designed to generate net electricity from a hydrogen fuel cycle - the same physics that powers the sun, finally domesticated. If the project works, Chesterfield will once again be the place where America's energy future was tested first, the way Falling Creek tested American iron in 1619 and the Chesterfield Railroad tested American railroads in 1831. Today the county is home to 364,548 people, the fourth-most-populous in Virginia. The Powhite Parkway and I-95 and Route 60 stitch it to the surrounding region. The river fall lines still matter. Some things take a long time to change.