The first years were a slow catastrophe. Disease, starvation, and conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy killed most of the early settlers. What saved the colony was an accident of botany. In 1612, John Rolfe successfully cultivated imported tobacco strains, and Virginia finally had a cash crop. Plantations sprouted along the James River, including Wolstenholme Towne in the southeastern corner of the future county. That settlement was devastated in the 1622 Powhatan uprising, rebuilt, then quietly abandoned around 1643. Its location was lost for over three centuries. Beginning in 1970, archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume excavated the site of Wolstenholme during digs at Carter's Grove Plantation, recovering one of Virginia's lost colonial towns from the dirt where it had hidden in plain sight.

By the late 1690s, Jamestown had burned for the second time, and Virginia's leaders had had enough of the malarial lowland. They moved the capital inland to Middle Plantation, a fortified settlement on the high ground midway across the peninsula. Renamed Williamsburg in honor of King William III, it became the political and cultural heart of colonial Virginia. The College of William and Mary had already been founded there in 1693. For eighty years, the small city was where royal governors held court, where Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry argued the case for independence, and where the Virginia House of Burgesses laid the groundwork for American self-government. The capital moved on to Richmond in 1780, and Williamsburg slipped into a sleepy century of decline.

What changed Williamsburg's fate was an Episcopal priest, an oil heir, and a vision. In the 1920s, Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. to fund the restoration of the colonial town. The Rockefellers bought hundreds of buildings, demolished anachronisms, and reconstructed what was missing using period drawings and archaeological evidence. The result was Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history attraction unlike anywhere else in America. To preserve the visitor experience, the foundation acquired vast tracts of surrounding James City County land, particularly to the east. The carefully protected approach roads - still free of commercial development today - are part of that vision. Drive in from the Colonial Parkway and you arrive in something close to 1775.

The Kingsmill tract east of town sat unproductive for decades until 1969, when Colonial Williamsburg chairman Winthrop Rockefeller began negotiations with August Anheuser Busch Jr. of St. Louis. The deal that emerged reshaped the local economy. Anheuser-Busch built a brewery, the Busch Gardens Williamsburg theme park (opened 1975, modeled on European hamlets), the Kingsmill resort community, and an office park. By the 21st century, AB and its successors had become the area's largest employer, surpassing both Colonial Williamsburg and the local military installations. Add in the Williamsburg Pottery Factory - a sprawling Outlet that drew busloads of shoppers for decades - and the Historic Triangle (Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown linked by the Colonial Parkway), and you have one of the most-visited stretches of land in America.

Strip away the attractions and James City County is still 142 square miles of Tidewater Virginia, straddling the James and York River watersheds. Eleven sub-watersheds cut through it, including Powhatan Creek, College Creek, and the Chickahominy. The Grove community on the southeastern edge, populated by African-American families displaced when Camp Peary and Naval Weapons Station Yorktown were established during the World Wars, sits alongside the James River Enterprise Zone, where industry has taken root. Scandinavian settlers founded Norge in the late 19th century when the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway opened up new land. The county has grown to 78,254 people, but the watersheds and forests still shape what gets built and what stays wild.