Life in Tidewater Virginia

 

(Based on a map of Tidewater Virgina published in Harper's Monthly Magazine. 1896)

If you had money in early Virginia, you wanted a river out front and tobacco out back. Throw in a boat landing, and you were in business. Nobody wanted to drag a load of tobacco through ten miles of mud if a ship could come collect it.

 

That was Tidewater. Low country, stretching from the Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay inland to the falls near Richmond and Fredericksburg. The James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac ran through it, with creeks branching off all over the place.

 

You could wave at your neighbor across the water. Getting to his house by road was another matter. Better take a boat unless you had most of the day to kill.

 

Native Virginians knew those waterways long before the English arrived. They farmed, fished, and got around by canoe. The newcomers took their land and brought war, but communities like the Pamunkey and Mattaponi held on.

 

By the early 1700s, everybody wanted tobacco money. Grow it, dry it, pack it into wooden barrels called hogsheads, and send it overseas. Ships came back with tools, cloth, dishes, and a fresh batch of things to spend money on.

Big planters put up fine houses and made sure that people listened when they talked politics. Small farmers worked to keep food on the table. Enslaved Africans and African Americans did much of the backbreaking fieldwork that made the big plantations pay.

 

George Washington was born on the Northern Neck in 1732. Before the army, before the presidency, he was a Virginia boy growing up around tobacco farms and people who wanted more land.

 

William Byrd II had Westover on the James and helped found Richmond. John Carter and his wife, Elizabeth Hill Carter, had Shirley nearby. These weren’t families content with a little cabin and a cabbage patch.

 

Over in Gloucester County, Mann Page I started Rosewell, a brick mansion big enough to turn heads. He died before it was done. His son, Mann Page II, got the unfinished house and the job of finishing it.

 

Jamestown got its start in Tidewater. Williamsburg became the colonial capital. Ships came and went. Tobacco changed hands, and wealthy planters argued over who should run things. 

 

Before the revolution, there was Tidewater Virginia.