13 Colonies began In 1557 and the first English settlement in North America was established. Virginia Dare was the first American child of engilish parents was born in Roanoke, VA.
By maddysawyer
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Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants
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In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company. In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant.
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It was not until 1616, when Virginia’s settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive
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The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619.
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The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement
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In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) African slaves.
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Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665).
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In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn’s North American holdings became the colony of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania
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Slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)
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In 1700, there were about 250,000 European and African settlers in North America’s thirteen English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were nearly 2.5 million. These colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.
