In the 21st century, Charles City County is part of the Greater Richmond Region of the state of Virginia.

[2] Notable natives include the 9th and 10th presidents of the United States, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler.

At the time of the earliest English settlement, the independent Chickahominy people occupied territory surrounded by numerous tribes of the powerful Powhatan Confederacy, but they were not part of it.

In 1619, the Virginia Company established Charles Cittie [sic] as one of the first four "boroughs" or "incorporations" in the region.

Colonists developed the land as tobacco plantations and produced this commodity crop for export.

The wealthier planters recruited indentured servants from the British Isles and Africa, and later purchased numerous enslaved Africans.

In Virginia and the Upper South, historians have classified persons holding 20 or more slaves as planters.

The English government offered land grants to these patrons under a headright system, which was a way to encourage settlement in the colony.

This in turn was later divided, in a pattern typical of colonial development, into several other counties and independent cities.

[citation needed] All told, five counties: Prince George County, Brunswick, Dinwiddie, Amelia, and Prince Edward; and three independent cities: Hopewell, Petersburg and Colonial Heights have been formed from the original territory of Charles City Shire.

[6] As in other parts of the Tidewater, common planters and merchants of Charles City County were attracted by the appeal of Methodist and Baptist preachers in the Great Awakening in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Several Methodist and Baptist churches were established in the early 19th century, mostly in the upland areas of the county.

The elite planters of the James River plantations tended to remain Anglican; the United States Episcopal Church was founded after the American Revolution.

[citation needed] With the growth of tobacco as a cash crop, demand for workers increased.

[7] During the late 1600s and early 1700s, African slave labor rapidly supplanted European indentured servants.

By the eighteenth century, slaves had become the major source of agricultural labor in the Virginia Colony, then devoted primarily to the labor-intensive commodity crop of tobacco.

The earliest record of a free black living in Charles City County is the September 16, 1677, petition for freedom by a woman named Susannah.

Colonial law and the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, provided that children were born into the status of their mother.

If illegitimate, they had to serve time in lengthy apprenticeships, but freedom gave them an important step forward.

[10] In the first two decades after the American Revolution, numerous planters in Charles City County freed their slaves, persuaded by Quaker, Baptist and Methodist abolitionists.

[11] The unincorporated town of Ruthville was the center of the county's free black population for many years.

[12] Virginia established statewide legal racial segregation when white Democrats regained control of the state legislature.

They disfranchised most blacks at the turn of the century, maintaining this exclusion until after passage of civil rights legislation.

In 1968, following passage of the federal Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, and federal enforcement of the black franchise, James Bradby of Charles City County was the first black American Virginian to be elected to the position of County Sheriff.

Charles City County features some of the larger and older of the extant James River plantations along State Route 5.

Local farmers have won national contests in bushel per acre grain production.

Charles City County farmers have also helped develop the leading technology for controlling runoff from grain cultivation.

When Hurricane Floyd in 1999 dropped approximately 19 inches (480 mm) of rain in 24 hours on some long-term never-till fields, visual observation showed virtually no erosion.