How Virginia Got Its Name From Queen Elizabeth I

Virginia is named for Queen Elizabeth I of England, who gave it the name herself after a 1584 voyage sent by Sir Walter Raleigh came home with reports of a rich new country. A poem printed in 1624 spells out the idea behind it: “Virgin Eliza nam’d it.” The funny part is where those first English visitors actually landed. It wasn’t in today’s Virginia.

The voyage that started it

In 1584, Elizabeth gave Walter Raleigh a royal license, called letters patent, to find and settle lands “not actually possessed by any Christians.” Raleigh didn’t go himself. He sent two small ships under Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe.

Captain John Smith, once president of the Virginia colony, retold Barlowe’s report in shortened form in his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, and it reads like a sales pitch. The ships left the Thames on April 27, 1584. On July 2, they reached what they called “the coast of Florida,” and smelled the land before they saw it: “a most delicate sweete smell.” The first island they landed on was so thick with grapes that, the report says, the waves sometimes washed over the vines.

The English learned that the country was called Wingandacoa, and that its king was named Wingina. The ships got back to England around the middle of September 1584.

The queen picks the name

Here’s how Smith puts it: “This discouery was so welcome into England that it pleased her Maiestie to call this Country of Wingandacoa, Virginia.”

That’s the whole naming story in the old record. The book’s table of contents says the same thing in fewer words: “the Country Wingandacoa was called Virginia by Queene Elizabeth.” The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 place-name book agrees that Virginia is “named for Elizabeth, Queen of England.”

Why Virginia? Smith doesn’t explain it himself. But among the poems printed at the front of his book is one by the writer Samuel Purchas, and that’s where the line “Virgin Eliza nam’d it” comes from. Purchas, at least, tied the name to Elizabeth as the “Virgin” queen.

Virginia started in North Carolina

Roanoke Island, where Raleigh’s colonists settled, is on the Outer Banks of what’s now North Carolina. Back then, the English counted Roanoke as part of Virginia. In Smith’s book, the margin note next to the Dare baby’s birth reads “A child borne in Virginia.”

The name came up again in the colony itself. In August 1587, a baby girl was born on Roanoke to Eleanor and Ananias Dare. Smith writes that “being the first Christian there borne,” she “was called Virginia.” Today, Dare County, North Carolina, is named for her. Its federal record says so, and it calls her the first child born in America to English parents.

The Roanoke colony vanished. No trace of it was ever found, the federal record for the island says. But the name stayed in use, and Virginia became one of the original 13 states.

Sources & further reading

• John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), in Edward Arber’s 1910 edition, vol. 1. Purchas’s poem with “Virgin Eliza nam’d it” (pp. 282–283); the table of contents, “the Country Wingandacoa was called Virginia by Queene Elizabeth” (p. 289); Raleigh’s patent and the account of the 1584 voyage, from the Thames on April 27 to the coast on July 2 (pp. 304–305); Wingandacoa and its king Wingina (p. 306); the return to England in September and “it pleased her Maiestie to call this Country of Wingandacoa, Virginia” (p. 310); the birth and naming of Virginia Dare in 1587, with the margin note “A child borne in Virginia” (p. 328).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 311. “One of the original thirteen States, named for Elizabeth, Queen of England.”
• GNIS feature 1026133, Dare County, North Carolina (U.S. Geological Survey). Says the county is in eastern North Carolina and was named for Virginia Dare, born August 18, 1587, on Roanoke Island, “the first child of English parents to be born in America.”
• GNIS feature 993416, Roanoke Island (U.S. Geological Survey). Says the island is part of the Outer Banks, was the site of the first attempted English colony in 1587, and that no trace of the colonists was ever found.
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Virginia’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779803).