<P> While other colonies were being founded, Virginia continued to grow . Tobacco planters held the best land near the coast, so new settlers pushed inland . Sir William Berkeley, the colony's governor, sent explorers over the Blue Ridge Mountains to open up the back country of Virginia to settlement . </P> <P> After independence from Great Britain in 1776 the Virginia Colony became the Commonwealth of Virginia, one of the original thirteen states of the United States, adopting as its official slogan "The Old Dominion". The states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, and portions of Ohio, were all later created from the territory encompassed earlier by the Colony of Virginia . </P>

The states of the south and west that became the focus