Richmond

Richmond stands at the fall line of the James River, where rapids mark the head of navigation and the rocky Piedmont gives way to the flat Tidewater plain. That break in the river — boats could go no farther upstream — fixed the site of a trading post that became Virginia's capital in 1780, when the seat of government moved inland from vulnerable colonial Williamsburg. The falls also powered early mills and ironworks.

The James runs through the city over the last of its rapids before widening into the tidal estuary that carries it to Chesapeake Bay. Richmond sits at the meeting of Piedmont and coastal plain, a historic city — capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War — that anchors a metro of more than a million in central Virginia.

• Virginia
  The Old Dominion, from the Chesapeake to the Blue Ridge located in