The Great Massacre at Falling Creek Iron Furnace, March 22, 1622

On March 22, 1622, Virginia Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy in eastern Virginia attack workers at the ironworks then being established on the banks of Falling Creek in Chesterfield County. This was one of a series of coordinated surprise attacks that concentrated on settlements upriver from Jamestown. Twenty-seven people, including John Berkeley, the overseer of the ironworks and a member of the governor's Council, died at the ironworks during the attack. The Indigenous forces destroyed much of the industrial equipment and threw some of it into the James River.

Sydney King recreated an imagined version of the attack at Falling Creek in this twentieth-century painting.