Virginia - A Commonwealth Built Around Government, Defense, and the Chesapeake
Virginia is officially a Commonwealth rather than a state, a legal distinction it shares with Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth holds about 8.7 million residents across 42,775 square miles. Virginia Beach is the largest city with roughly 455,000 people, followed by Chesapeake at 245,000 and Norfolk at 240,000. Richmond, the capital, served as the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, and its architecture, museums, and street grid still reflect that history.
The federal government and the defense sector dominate Virginia's economy. Arlington County and Fairfax County, together with Alexandria, form the core of Northern Virginia, a federal contractor corridor that extends along the Potomac opposite Washington, D.C. The Pentagon sits in Arlington, and agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to the intelligence community anchor tens of thousands of private-sector contractors in Tysons, Reston, and Chantilly. Amazon's HQ2 campus in Arlington is adding tens of thousands of jobs over the next decade.
Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, houses the largest concentration of naval power in the world. Norfolk Naval Station is the largest naval base on Earth by personnel and ship count, and the Newport News Shipbuilding yard across the harbor is the only facility in the United States that builds Nimitz and Ford-class aircraft carriers. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and Portsmouth round out the Hampton Roads metro, which counts about 1.8 million residents and moves containerized cargo through the Port of Virginia.
Outside these two metros the Commonwealth thins out quickly. Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation home on the Potomac, and Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's hilltop estate outside Charlottesville, pull millions of visitors each year. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville is one of the older public universities in the country, founded by Jefferson in 1819. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley run along the western edge of the Commonwealth, giving way to the coalfields of far southwest Virginia near the Kentucky border.
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Virginia is officially a Commonwealth rather than a state, a legal distinction it shares with Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth holds about 8.7 million residents across 42,775 square miles. Virginia Beach is the largest city with roughly 455,000 people, followed by Chesapeake at 245,000 and Norfolk at 240,000. Richmond, the capital, served as the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, and its architecture, museums, and street grid still reflect that history.
The federal government and the defense sector dominate Virginia's economy. Arlington County and Fairfax County, together with Alexandria, form the core of Northern Virginia, a federal contractor corridor that extends along the Potomac opposite Washington, D.C. The Pentagon sits in Arlington, and agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to the intelligence community anchor tens of thousands of private-sector contractors in Tysons, Reston, and Chantilly. Amazon's HQ2 campus in Arlington is adding tens of thousands of jobs over the next decade.
Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, houses the largest concentration of naval power in the world. Norfolk Naval Station is the largest naval base on Earth by personnel and ship count, and the Newport News Shipbuilding yard across the harbor is the only facility in the United States that builds Nimitz and Ford-class aircraft carriers. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and Portsmouth round out the Hampton Roads metro, which counts about 1.8 million residents and moves containerized cargo through the Port of Virginia.
Outside these two metros the Commonwealth thins out quickly. Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation home on the Potomac, and Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's hilltop estate outside Charlottesville, pull millions of visitors each year. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville is one of the older public universities in the country, founded by Jefferson in 1819. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley run along the western edge of the Commonwealth, giving way to the coalfields of far southwest Virginia near the Kentucky border.
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