Richmond International

The largest living-history museum in the world — 301 acres restoring Virginia's 18th-century colonial capital, where costumed interpreters work as blacksmiths, printers, and silversmiths, fife-and-drum corps march the streets, and the daily drama of the run-up to revolution plays out in the Capitol and the Governor's Palace. Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, the largest and most influential of the colonies; Patrick Henry, Washington, and Jefferson all argued here. By the 1920s the old town had decayed; John D. Rockefeller Jr. quietly funded a massive restoration, and the result anchors the "Historic Triangle" with Jamestown (first permanent English settlement, 1607) and Yorktown (where the British surrendered in 1781) nearby.

Thomas Jefferson spent forty years designing, building, tearing down, and rebuilding Monticello — "little mountain" in Italian — on a hilltop outside Charlottesville. It's the only private home in America on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the only one on a U.S. coin (look at the back of the nickel). The neoclassical house is a self-portrait of his mind: the dome, the hidden dumbwaiters and clever gadgets, the entrance-hall "museum" of fossils and Native American artifacts, the seven-day clock. It's also the place that holds his contradictions most plainly — the author of "all men are created equal" enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, and the plantation that the modern site now interprets honestly was worked by them. Jefferson is buried in the family graveyard on the slope below.

17.6 miles of bridge, trestle, and tunnel crossing the mouth of Chesapeake Bay between Virginia Beach and Cape Charles on the Delmarva Peninsula. Construction began October 1960, completed 42 months later, opened April 15, 1964. Designated one of the "Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World" by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1965 — and the year's outstanding civil engineering achievement. The crossing has 12 miles of low-level trestle bridges, two one-mile undersea tunnels (so ships can pass overhead), two high-clearance bridges, four 5.25-acre artificial islands marking the tunnel portals, and total height difference of six inches from south end to north end. Built entirely from revenue bonds — no federal, state, or local tax dollars. A parallel southbound span opened in 1999. As of 2021, more than 140 million vehicle crossings.

George Washington's plantation home sits on a bluff above the Potomac eight miles south of Alexandria, the house he expanded over decades into the red-roofed mansion with its iconic two-story piazza facing the river — a porch he designed himself, where he liked to sit and watch the water. He was born into it, inherited it, farmed it as an experimental agriculturalist, returned to it after the Revolution and again after the presidency, and is buried in the tomb on the grounds with Martha. Like Monticello, the modern estate interprets the full story, including the more than 300 enslaved people who ran the plantation. Saved from ruin in the 1850s by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association — the first national historic-preservation group in America — it has been open to the public ever since.