It protects and interprets several sites relating to the Colony of Virginia and the history of the United States more broadly.

These range from the site of the first English settlement at Jamestown, to the battlefields of Yorktown where the British Army was defeated in the American Revolutionary War.

The Thomas Nelson House was built around 1724 and served as Cornwallis's headquarters during the final battle of the Revolutionary War.

He used his Green Spring Plantation as an experimental farm to develop sources of income for the colony other than cultivated tobacco and traded furs.

The Cape Henry Memorial is at the site of the landing of Captain Christopher Newport and the Jamestown colonists in 1607.