Henry:

These figures are not outlandish. If I recall correctly, during the 1720s
when Virginia was trying to regulate tobacco production by, among other
things, allowing each laborer to tend only a certain number of plants and
no more, the figure allowed per tithable was 10,000. The Northampton
County loose court records in Eastville contain several "counts" of
tobacco plants on each farm by local tobacco inspectors in the late 1720s.

For the best data on actual output (tobacco, corn, wheat) in the
Chesapeake in the 18th century, look at Lorena Walsh's essay in Ira Berlin
and Philip Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of
Slave Life in the Americas (1993).

Douglas Deal
Professor of History and Director of General Education
State University of New York at Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
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