I'm not sure that "peasant" is an apt description of any 18C
Virginians. Technically as they owned their own land they would be
"yeomen".
I also think the distinction Harold GIll is urging, while possibly of
utility in the 17C, is less and less so during the 18C. While it is
true that many, even most, early settlers in Tidewater concentrated
on growing tobacco, this was less true as the 1700s progressed. The
profits available from tobacco were no longer as high and the demand
for commodities like corn and wheat growing. Also where the terrain
of Tidewater made large plantations possible, the topography of the
Piedmont and Ridge and Valley was more ammenable to smaller farms.
By the mid 1700s at least 40% of Virginia's exports were non-tobacco.
The majority of the acreage of the Piedmont was devoted to non-
tobacco cultivation. There have been a number of studies done on
this. And the economy of even the plantations was diversifying. A
couple of classic examples are Mount Vernon, Monticello, and
Montpelier. Realizing that his tobacco revenues were falling,
Washington built a large still and a fishery. Jefferson's slaves at
Monticello ran a large nailery. At Montpelier for a considerable
period over half of the income of the property was generated by a
large smithing operation on the site of the tempietto.
Other "plantation" owners were also involved in economic
diversification, which included iron production. The Tayloes were
involved in the Bristol Ironworks, Neabsco, and Occoquan. Alexander
Spotswood built both the Tubal Ironworks (often incorrectly called
Germanna) and the double air furnace (foundry) at Massaponax. Gov.
Gooch was involved in the Fredericksville Ironworks (not Spotswood).
The Washington's were partners in the Principio Co, which operated a
number of ironworks in Maryland, but also a blast furnace on
Washington's land along the Accokeek Creek near Ferry Farm (The
Potomac, now called Accokeek IW). By the time of the American
Revolution the British North American Colonies were making more iron
than the home country. About half of which was made in Maryland and
VIrginia (much of the rest in Pennsylvania).
Bergstrom, Peter V.
1980 Markets and Merchants: Economic Diversification in Colonial
Virginia, 1700-1775. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor
and London.
Brothers, James H. IV
1999a Introduction to Pre-Industrial Iron Manufacturing. Presented at
Furnace & Forge: 225 Years of Iron Working, Lost River Valley Museum,
WV.
1999b Isaac Zane and The Marlboro Iron Works. Presented at Furnace &
Forge: 225 Years of Iron Working, Lost River Valley Museum, WV.
2000a Manufacturing Iron in Colonial Virginia: Its Importance and How
it was Made in Blast Furnace, Bloomery, and Finery Forge. Paper
presented at the Pioneer America Society, Richmond, VA.
2000b Blast Furnace, Forge, and Foundry- The Making of Iron in
Colonial Virginia (revision of the Uplands Paper). Paper presented at
The Archeological Society of Virginia.
2001 'Carried on At A Very Great Expense And Never Produced Any
Profit' Titanium and the Albemarle Ironworks (1770-72): The Case for
Slag Analysis. Paper presented at the Society for Historical
Archaeology, Long Beach, CA.
2002 'Carried on At A Very Great Expense And Never Produced Any
Profit' The Albemarle Ironworks (1770-72). Unpublished Masters
Thesis, Department of Anthropolgy, The College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg.
2004a It's a Horse, It's a Bear, No It's a Salamander: Toward a More
Concise Jargon for Iron Industrial Archaeology. Paper presented at
the 2004 Ironmasters, Rehoboth Beach, DE.
2004b The Manufacture of Iron in Colonial America. Paper presented at
the 1st Pre-Industrial Iron Conference, The Farmers’ Museum,
Cooperstown, NY.
2005 Blast Furnace, Forge and Foundry. Uplands Archaeology in the
East: Symposia VIII & IX (pp. 335-353). Paper presented at the 2000
Uplands Conference, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA.
Archeological Society of Virginia, Special Publication 38-7.
Brothers, James H. IV and Charles P. Swann.
2001 'Carried On At A Very Great Expense And Never Produced Any
Profit': Titanium and the Ruination of the Albemarle Ironworks
(1770-72). Paper presented at the Society for Industrial Archeology,
Washington, DC.
Brothers, James H. IV; Charles P. Swann, and Geof Grimes
2002 Albemarle Iron Works (1771–1772): Why did this operation fail?.
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 189 (2002) 340–
343. Elsevier Science B.V. www.elsevier.com/locate/nimb. Paper
presented at the IX International Conference on Particle-Induced X-
Ray Emission and its Analytical Applications (PIXE 2001), Guelph,
Canada.
Dermody, Larry D.
1992 Fire and Ice: The Col. James Madison Ironworks at Montpelier,
1762-1801. Paper presented at the 1992 Annual Conference of The
Society for Historical Archaeology, Kingston, Jamaica.
Kamoie, Laura Croghan
2003 Neabsco and Occoquan: The Tayloe family's iron plantations,
1740-1780. Prince William Historical Commission, Prince William.
Lewis, Lynne G., Larry D. Dermody
1990 Archaeology on Ice: The Tempietto/Ice House at Montpelier.
Manuscript on file at Montpelier.
McCusker, John J, and Russell R. Menard
1985 The Economy of British America, 1607-1789. Institute of Early
American History and Culture, The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill and London.
Parker, Scott K, Lynne G. Lewis, Larry D. Dermody, and Ann L. Miller
1996 Crafty Businessmen: A New Perspective on 18th-Century Plantation
Economics. In The Archaeology of 18th-Century Virginia, edited by
Theodore R. Reinhart, pp. 183-207. Council of Virginia Archaeologists
and the Archeological Society of Virginia Special Publication No. 35.
Archeological Society of Virginia, Richmond.
James Brothers
[log in to unmask]
On Sep 27, 2007, at 23:49, John Philip Adams wrote:
> This sounds like more of a class distinction than a land size issue.
> Plantations belonged to the Gentry and the farms belong to the
> peasants.
>
> John Philip Adams
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