Prior to the arrival of the English
colonists at Jamestown in the Colony of Virginia in 1607, the area which became
Williamsburg was within the territory of the Powhatan Confederacy. By the
1630s, English settlements had grown to dominate the lower (eastern) portion of
the Virginia Peninsula, and the Powhatan tribes had abandoned their nearby
villages. Between 1630 and 1633, after the war that followed the Indian
Massacre of 1622, the English colonists constructed a defensive palisade across
the peninsula and a settlement named Middle Plantation as a primary guard
station along the palisade
