A Lasting Settlement Jamestown is the first lasting English settlement in North America. Five years after the settlers started their colony, they found the gold that would make the colony rich. It was tobacco. Selling tobacco was the beginning of a profitable business for the colonists.

Did you know? The early Jamestown settlers made several unsuccessful attempts to develop profitable enterprises, including silk making, glassmaking, lumber and sassafras. By experimenting with growing and curing tobacco from seeds obtained from the Caribbean, John Rolfe developed the colony’s first profitable export.

It didn’t take the colonists long to realize that economic specialization would be the way to go, and tobacco became a cash crop for the colony.

In 1612, John Rolfe, one of many shipwrecked on Bermuda, helped turn the settlement into a profitable venture. He introduced a new strain of tobacco from seeds that he brought and tobacco became the long-awaited cash crop for the Virginia Company, who wanted to make money off their investment in Jamestown.

Colony of Virginia

The Jamestown colony was clearly established by sixteen twenty-four. It was even beginning to earn money by growing and selling a new crop: tobacco. The other early English settlements in North America were much to the north, in what is today the state of Massachusetts.

Explanation: THe first settlere in Jamestown were english settlers, that were poor and were aged 17-35 years old, they arrived to Jamestown in 1607, they were around 140 children and men and they arrived in Virginia and named the settlement Jamestown honoring King James I from England.