People who participated in the survey also suggested other people whose names are not now as widely known as they possibly should be.

Librarian Frances Pollard singled out for commendation "the mothers and daughters and wives and single women who came, both willingly and under duress, to the new colony.

"These are the ladies and the indentured servants and the convicts who left their homes for Virginia, and whose contributions were essential if not always valued. These are the African women who were taken from their homes and sold into bondage and whose labor was vital to the success of the New World.

"All of these women - Indian, African, and European - experienced Virginia in different ways but they all adapted, and they and their children ensured the survival of Virginia. Their names are lost and their contributions may have been invisible, but their lives are worth remembering as we step back and consider our history."

Ervin Jordan, a historian and archivist, also suggested a person whose name is not now known: the first enslaved person who ran away or resisted enslavement. "It requires courage to be the first," Jordan wrote. "The name of this slave will remain unknown but he or she forever influenced the course of the Old Dominion's history as thousands more would escape over the next 200 years."

OTHER PARTICIPANTS in the poll also referred to the Africans and persons of African descent who were transported to Virginia without their consent and suggested that their contributions to Virginia's history should not be ignored - and the injustices perpetrated on them should not be forgotten.

Historian and editor Katharine Harbury nominated in the greatest category a clergyman, Matthew Goodwyn, who lived in Virginia for several years in the middle of the 17th century. After he returned to England, he spoke and preached against the institution of slavery as it was then evolving in the colonies. Goodwyn published a short book in 1680, The Negroes and Indians Advocate, in defense of the rights of people who were trapped in slavery. Goodwyn's detestation of slavery was a direct result of what he saw in Virginia, where tobacco planters treated their laborers in what he believed were inhumane and unchristian ways.

Harbury also recalled some otherwise poorly known and apparently unremarkable people who did something remarkable and courageous. In 1699, George Ivey (or Ivie) and some other men from Lower Norfolk County (which included the area that is now Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Chesapeake) petitioned the governor against a recent statute that forbid blacks or Indians from marrying white people. Some white Virginians disliked and protested the racism that had infiltrated Virginia's laws and society as chattel racial slavery evolved. Their protest suggests that the abominations that accompanied slavery were not inevitable and that they were the results of conscious acts of the colony's leadership.

THE NAMES OF many of the great, influential, successful, or exemplary residents of Virginia are not familiar to most Virginians, but they were well-known during their lifetimes. Ross Mackenzie, formerly of

The Times-Dispatch, wrote that "[t]he greatest Virginians of the 16th and 17th centuries have to be those who landed at Jamestown and elsewhere in Virginia."

Mackenzie continued, "For the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the greatness of the slaves certainly presents itself for consideration: for their suffering, their endurance, their courage, their example, and their multitudinous contributions across more than 200 years."

A. Barton Hinkle, deputy editor of The Times-Dispatch's Editorial Pages, nominated Thomas West, baron De La Warr, as the greatest man of the century for saving the colony when he arrived with colonists and supplies in the spring of 1610 - rescuing the survivors of the terrible "starving time" winter, during which more than half the people in Jamestown died.

"They had decided to return to England," Hinkle wrote, but De La Warr "persuaded them otherwise, ordered the building of forts, and thereby secured the state's future. Absent that, there might have been no colony for his successors to see through to permanence."

Historian James Sweeney singled out James Blair as one of the greatest men of 17th-century Virginia. A clergyman, Blair arrived in Virginia in the 1680s and was a founder and first president of the College of William and Mary. He lived until the 1740s and might therefore be regarded as more an 18th-century man than a 17th-century man.

Sweeney wrote, "The odds against Blair's project were indeed long. His single-minded pursuit of his goal involved traveling to London to obtain a charter and the establishment of an endowment. He worked tirelessly to establish the school and secure its financial support." Moreover, Blair "successfully lobbied the burgesses to relocate the capital from Jamestown to Middle Plantation (soon to be renamed Williamsburg) after the state house at Jamestown burned in 1698. The relocation of the capital to the site of the college would benefit the college in many ways.

"Blair's legacy," Sweeney emphasized, "lives on today in the College of William and Mary, one of the nation's most highly regarded institutions of higher learning."

The names and deeds of white women in 17th-century Virginia are not well-known except to scholars who specialize in studying them. One stands out, though. Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell. She was a cousin of Gov. Thomas Culpeper; wife of another Virginia governor, Sir William Berkeley; and also the wife of two governors of the colony that became known as North Carolina.

Lady Frances Berkeley, as she is usually referred to in the historical literature, was a very remarkable person. She was politically astute and appears to have known everybody of consequence in the Colonies and most of the important men in London. When Bacon's Rebellion broke out in the spring of 1676, her husband, the governor, sent her to London to explain the situation to the king.

LADY BERKELEY returned to Virginia later in the year after the collapse of the rebellion, and before the arrival of royal commissioners and ships full of soldiers the king had sent to the colony to quell the rebellion.

One of the commissioners also had instructions to replace Sir William Berkeley as governor, and the king recalled his old and faithful servant to London. Not surprisingly, relations between Berkeley and the commissioners were tense during the weeks between their arrival and his departure.

On one occasion after the commissioners had ridden from Jamestown to Berkeley's plantation at Green Spring, they were astonished when they got back in their carriage to find that the colony's hangman was in the driver's seat. The men looked back and saw Lady Berkeley smiling down at them from the window and concluded, probably correctly, that she was responsible for insulting them in that fashion.

After the death of Gov. Berkeley, Lady Berkeley presided over what historians call the Green Spring Faction. This powerful alliance of political leaders gathered at Green Spring plantation to plan strategy to resist the imposition of royal restrictions on the colony during the years after Bacon's Rebellion.

Ultimately, the faction's members were unable to prevent the crown from reducing the powers of the General Assembly. They obstructed but could not stop the heavy-handed royal governors the king sent to Virginia. During the 1680s, Lady Berkeley was one of the most influential political leaders in Virginia - and everybody knew it. -Brent Tarter