By 1611 the colonists had completed the interior town. Ralph Hamor wrote that Jamestown contained two rows of houses, a two story corn loft, a church or chapel, and three long storehouses attached together sprawling 120 feet long by 40 feet wide. In the following years more colonists and livestock arrived from England for the establishing of additional settlements in the region, with Jamestown as the capital.

The colony was finally thriving. Tobacco emerged as the banner export sustaining Virginia's economy. Difficulties with the Powhatan subsided with the marriage of Chief Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, to tobacco farmer John Rolfe. Unfortunately, by 1622 the English appetite for more and more land pushed the Powhatan too far. They rose up against the settlers attacking plantations and killing more that 300 colonists.