Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library

Museum Applications

The results of this project will be used in a number of ongoing museum programs at Colonial Williamsburg including foodways, livestock, gardens, rural trades, operating and exhibition taverns and stores, Carter's Grove plantation, and special programs and tours dealing with the themes of work, family life, slavery, material culture and standards of living. They will also contribute to the planning and interpretation of two new exhibit complexes, the reconstructed outbuildings at the Peyton Randolph House and a projected reconstructed public market house. We will deposit copies of our final report in the Foundation Library, and we plan to schedule a series of public presentations on project results for museum staff, museum visitors, and interested members of the local community.

Other museums and cultural agencies who generously lent faunal collections for analysis or shared original site data will of course receive reports on the work we performed. Copies of our final report will be deposited in the Maryland State Archives and with Historic Annapolis, Inc. Some members of the project team will meet with staff members from Historic Annapolis, Londontown, and Historic St. Mary's City to discuss results and possible public program applications there. We will also share our findings with related research projects with which we have been exchanging ideas and methods: Warren Hofstra and Robert Mitchell's ongoing study of urbanization in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (also supported in part by NEH), the foodways program at Monticello with whom we shared a project intern, and "Feeding the City," a collaborative study of provisioning in London conducted by the Centre for Metropolitan History, University of London, and the Department of Social and Economic History, Queen's University, Belfast.

Computerized Data Bases

Building upon the expertise they gained over the course of this project in linking data bases, Jones and Brown are now working on a project at Colonial Williamsburg to link x additional disparate data sources such as catalogues of archaeological collections and architectural surveys with existing and future biographical and probate inventory files, as well as to maps of the town and countryside. It is planned that this master file will be made available for use by the public in the Foundation Library in an easy to use format. This further initiative offers some assurance that the effort expended in this project in creating new data bases and in updating digitized dinosaurs will not in turn be lost, through lack of use or of updating, in the next round of technological advances.

Presentations to Academic Audiences

Over the next several years members of the project team will be giving papers based on project findings at annual meetings of historical, economic, and archaeological associations, at academic seminars and workshops, and at special conferences devoted to particular themes. We then plan to submit articles on some of the more technical aspects of our project to academic journals. We have also been approached by the editors of the planned new addition of Historical Statistics about the possible inclusion of some of the project data in this widely used reference work.

Publications

Ann Martin has already made considerable progress in drafting a manuscript on town provisioning systems based on the results of this project for which she will be the principal author. She is now seeking outside support to underwrite its completion next year. Joanne Bowen plans to write an extensive monograph on Chesapeake husbandry systems in the near future once additional documentary and archaeological research has been completed. This includes further work on issues of livestock management and reproduction that we have found to be critical as a result of the work we completed in the course of this project, and a study of phytoliths (plant remains left on the teeth of domestic animals) in the faunal assemblages in order to identify changes in livestock feeding practices that cannot be obtained from documentary records.

Zooarchaeological Research-Joanne Bowen, Directing Zooarchaeologist

The zooarchaeology team has worked long and hard to make this project a success. Analysts Stephen C. Atkins, Jeremiah Dandoy, and Gwenyth Duncan each worked long hours to identify in a very short period of time seemingly endless numbers of bones. Steve plowed through old archaeological records to identify assemblages from sometimes poorly analyzed materials. Susan Arter, Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution, complete the tooth wear analyses of numerous assemblages. Ethel Wu, who came to us through the New Horizons School for gifted science students, initially learned to analyze tooth wear, then continued to develop a system refining Grant's method of tooth wear analysis. She also helped complete the graphics needed to present the faunal data. Susan Trevarthen Andrews skillfully transcribed faunal data from written cards and data sheets provided by Henry Miller and Elizabeth Reitz.

To define narrow time periods in various assemblages Fraser Neiman helped develop statistical methods to quickly analyze artifact assemblages. Numerous Colonial Williamsburg employees on temporary duty and volunteers helped to number the piles of bones, and enter data into the computer. Our thanks to them all.

An integral and extremely important part of the team were several volunteers, including Dr. Frank Carpenter, who used his considerable research abilities to single-handedly read and transcribe thousands of records containing information on animal husbandry. His contribution to this project will become the foundation from which further work in the Rare Breeds program at Colonial Williamsburg will be based. Joseph Doyle contributed with his incredible support, transcribing tax records, researching family histories for different sites, and measuring bones. Lewis Madson helped to rough sort bones and to develop a computerized numbering system capable of numbering 400-600 bones a day. Lyell Smollen took my class in Zooarchaeology, then armed with analytical skills began to transcribe old data cards, conduct documentary research, measure bones, and assist in printing out thousands of animal husbandry records. Tom Pratt helped develop graphics. Each made their own important and unique contribution.

Students played an important role in completing this project. Rebecca Ferrell completed her senior research project at the College of William and Mary on the Kingsmill Slave Quarter. We have her to thank for ferreting out useful information on the multiple components of this site. My class completed the analysis of the Ferry Farm assemblage-my thanks to each who analyzed what seemed to them an ungodly number of bones. We all had a good time!

An additional thanks goes to Greg Brown, Susan Trevarthen Andrews, and Stephen Atkins, who completed the analysis of additional assemblages that provided greater depth and breadth to the data base. Those who contracted with us to complete additional work include the xii Mount Vernon Ladies Association, William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research, and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Dennis Pogue, Esther White, David Hazzard, Dennis Blanton, and Donald Linebaugh each worked closely with us to incorporate our research goals into analyses performed for their projects. We are very grateful, and the results of this work illustrates the best collaborative spirit of contract-related research.

We thank all the archaeologists and organizations who so kindly allowed us to analyze faunal materials they had excavated years before. In particular, Beth Acuff and Keith Egloff of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources worked patiently with us to pull out appropriate assemblages and related documentation, then help get the assemblages physically to Williamsburg where the analysis was completed. Archaeologists who had excavated the assemblages on occasion kindly helped us to interpret maps and records. A special thanks to David Hazzard, Daniel Mouer, Robert Hunter, Jr. for their advice, support, and knowledge of the sites they had excavated.

We were delighted with the collegial spirit offered by Mark Leone and Laura Galke of Historic Annapolis, by Henry Miller of the St. Mary's City Commission, and by Elizabeth Reitz and Justin Lev-Tov. Historic Annapolis kindly gave us permission to transcribe all raw faunal data into our computer system. Elizabeth Reitz provided the data for the Calvert House and Reynolds Tavern and Justin Lev-Tov kindly provided the raw data for the Jonas Green site.

Lastly, we want to thank our zooarchaeology colleagues who have encouraged this work over the year. Pam Crabtree always lent a critical ear and gave helpful suggestions; Melinda Zeder and Elizabeth Reitz both gave encouragement, support, and advice whenever I asked; and Richard Meadows helped with advice on ageing techniques. The results speak for themselves.

Historical Research-Ann Smart Martin, Directing Historian

The historical team has benefited from the help and ideas of many. Ann Smart Martin and Jennifer Jones were on the ground in Williamsburg. Larry Peskin worked with Maryland materials in Annapolis. Lorena Walsh moved regularly between both worlds.

It is a joy to work with the knowledgeable and generous people who make up the Research Division at Colonial Williamsburg. Our colleagues in the Department of Historical Research unstintingly answered our many questions and graciously opened their impressive file cabinets to us. Pat Gibbs, our departmental specialist on foodways, shared her vast library, files, and ongoing research so that we began the project running. Julie Richter's command of the York County Project prevented many missteps in linking our data to older files. Kevin Kelly's extensive knowledge of Chesapeake history provided us with an instant resource, and he invariably passed on his own research and reference files relating to our work. Lou Powers, Linda Rowe, and Cathy Hellier provided us not only with a congenial working environment, but also shared information.

The staff of the historic food programs also met with us in the earliest stages of this project. Wendy Howell, Dennis Cotner, and Frank Clark all gave us good insights and we look forward to further such collaboration.

Historic St. Mary's City kindly provided original worksheets for York County inventories that speeded our work on these materials as well as computer data files for York and xiii Anne Arundel County probate inventories. Staff at Historic Annapolis, Inc. helped us identify appropriate account books for analysis and speeded research in Annapolis by allowing us to use biographical materials and other unpublished reports.

One pleasant outcome of this grant was a new collaborative effort between the Department of Research at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello) and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. With the help of Anne Lucas, the two departments jointly sponsored an intern, Amy Rider, in a project that will benefit both institutions.

Other colleagues have helped in inestimable ways by providing information. Thanks are due to Jim Whittenburg, Harold Gill, Warren Hofstra, Robert Mitchell, Ellen Donald, Mary Ferrari, Joseph Mosier, Bernie Herman, and, most especially, Mick Nichols.

We have had a vast array of interns, students, and volunteers, without whom this task could never have been completed. Nancy Hess has had the longest connection with us and we look forward to continuing work with her. We have relied on Nancy to do immense biographical research and entry and she cheerfully picked up every task assigned. Matt Churchill quickly mastered data base management skills to coordinate the entry of hundreds of biographical entries. Michele Jarrett acquired intimate knowledge of the eighteenth-century neighborhood around Williamsburg, creating the original maps that are so impressive in Appendix 6. Amy Rider not only entered several thousand records relating to Jefferson's Washington, D.C. kitchens, she also accomplished the formidable task of translating them from French. Nicholas Kimpan's culinary and historical skills were combined in the transcription and study of Virginia manuscript cookbooks. Jill Bender spent many quiet Friday afternoons in the Department of Historical Research reading eighteenth-century newspapers. Meg Schwartz stole time from her internship with another staff member to help us with biographical research. David Rinker applied his interest in brewing to several months of research on the process of making beer and bread in the eighteenth century. Mike Ward continued the research of Michele Jarrett in expanding our study of eighteenth-century land changes in York County. Heather Wainwright spent several years in the department of Historical Research becoming an expert on eighteenth-century tavern keeping. Her forthcoming master's thesis is based on the work she did for us in the coding and biographical research for the Anne Pattison account book. We look forward to seeing her completed work.

Finally, we would like to express our thanks to Heather Harvey and Tami Carsillo, who along with Nancy Hess provided invaluable last-minute production help.

A. ISSUES AND PROBLEMS

After a century of European settlement, some few permanent towns did finally take root in the Chesapeake region. The most substantial began as centers of government, while lesser concentrations of population grew around tidewater shipping centers and fall line transshipment points. Until the 1790s all remained at best small market towns by comparison to such metropolises as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and larger English cities. Still these urban places were similar to country towns throughout the colonies and in provincial England that had 3 comparable or only slightly larger populations. Our study area is shown in Figure 1.1. These lesser urban places commanded sufficiently large populations that could either strain available local rural food resources, or more likely, encourage some area farmers and their enslaved workers to restructure their productive strategies in order to accommodate and take advantage of emerging urban needs. Understanding how the residents of towns like Williamsburg and Annapolis fed and warmed themselves supplies insight into the developing provisioning systems that supplied other colonial towns, less thoroughly investigated, in the Chesapeake and elsewhere. And, our results as well as other comparative studies suggest, even in such small urban places, by the early nineteenth century, the methods of production and distribution of foods and fuel was becoming recognizably modern. As all but the most isolated of rural areas were increasingly drawn into more integrated international marketing networks, the residents of modest market and administrative centers, no less than inhabitants of leading metropolises, had no option but to accommodate themselves and their families to at least some of the operating modes and relations of international capitalism.³

While humankind does not live by bread alone, until the industrial revolution was well advanced, most ordinary families in Europe or in North America spent between half and two-thirds of their incomes on food and another six to nine percent for fuel. The expenses of transportation, processing, and distribution of these essentials made living in towns more costly than maintaining comparable standards in the countryside. The increased costs weighed especially heavily on the urban poor.⁴ Among the costs of town living, current research suggests, was a worse diet for many urban residents than that available to even the most humble of rural folk, this despite the fact that most urban workers earned higher real wages than rural laborers. Higher costs explain only part of the discrepancy, leaving open the possibility that town dwellers instead used their earnings to buy other, more prestigious kinds of goods.⁵ Alternatively, poor people may 4 Figure 1.1. Study Area sometimes have found bread, tea, sugar, alcohol, and prepared foods more readily available, sometimes perhaps to be purchased on credit, than meat, milk, or good quality fresh vegetables. Doubtless some marginal residents of these Chesapeake towns suffered, as did poor town dwellers in larger urban places, during economic downturns, political crises, and individual misfortunes such as prolonged illness, but here their numbers were too few either to exert much political pressure on local officials or to elicit sustained demands for public or private relief.

We do know that the evolving local provisioning system did not completely satisfy all town dwellers. Immigrant Europeans, who in the eighteenth century made up a disproportionate percentage of Chesapeake town populations, voiced dissatisfaction with the lack of variety and 5 especially the exorbitant prices, compared to Europe, of the foods available in town markets. Wealthier native-born townsfolk sometimes voiced similar complaints, but remedied the deficiency by having everything from fattened cattle to nuts, fruits, and firewood transported to town from both nearby plantations and holdings up to two hundred miles away. The towns' poor left no written accounts of their hardships or of their coping strategies. However studies of the poor in other towns demonstrate that low and irregular wages, shortages of fuel, and inadequate cooking facilities could often lead to diets decidedly lacking in variety, adequate nutrients, and sometimes adequate calories.

Our research design has placed special emphasis on the economic relationships of early Chesapeake towns with their hinterlands, the social connections between town residents and farmers in the countryside who produced food for them, the networks created and used by different social and economic groups engaged in provisioning towns like Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Annapolis, and differences in urban and rural diets that resulted from townspeople's dependence on others for most of their food. For convenience we use the term "provisioning system" to include local production of food and fuel, importation of foods and fuels from other regions, transportation of these goods to market, food processing by intermediaries, distribution of these essential to consumers, and the social connections that facilitated economic exchanges.⁶

For townspeople, the process of feeding and warming themselves involved more than simple economic transactions. They, also of necessity, often became enmeshed in special social relationships with those who produced, distributed, and processed their food. Town residents and their neighbors in the adjacent countryside participated in two very different marketing systems. First, there was the international mercantile sector through which cash crops were exported, goods from outside the region imported and retailed in country as well as town stores, and credit extended to planters by British firms. The international trading system moved large volumes of goods, and many middlemen intervened in the multitude of transactions that separated planters from the final consumers of their crops in Europe and the West Indies.⁷

Second, there was the local trade sector. It differed from the first both in scale and character. Most local transactions involved the exchange of smaller quantities of goods, and most exchanges were made face to face between persons who knew each other, sometimes intimately. The organization of this second sector centered around economic relationships in which the social content was often a fundamental determinant. The social relations that underlay local provisioning systems are not clearly described in the documentary sources and so have remained elusive to economic historians. This failure has been reinforced by the habit of thinking first and foremost of the tight-knit networks of kin, friends, and neighbors that James Henretta, Robert Gross, and 6 other historians have described as commonplace in small rural communities.⁸ However social relations in market systems, economic anthropologists have shown, usually extend beyond these primary relations to include acquaintances and strangers with whom mutually beneficial personal relationships may eventually develop.⁹

In the two Chesapeake capitals, with their mix of native-born inhabitants with long and deep roots in the surrounding countryside, and of recent immigrants from distant places who had few local connections and fewer of long standing, the marketing system was decidedly more complex than those of surrounding rural areas which experienced little immigration in the last three quarters of the eighteenth century.¹⁰ Most large Chesapeake planters, for example, traded with their rural neighbors and with more distant kin primarily by means of book credit. Individual accounts often ran on for years, with balances calculated infrequently and irregularly, and creditor planters often loathe to aggressively pressure heavily indebted neighbors. Similarly, country storekeepers found they could not long survive without extending credit freely and sometimes imprudently to their rural customers.

Large area planters producing for urban markets also traded with some regular town customers on book credit, especially for substantial amounts of meat or grains, but were more likely to balance such accounts more frequently, and to seek payment of outstanding balances more rigorously, and indeed often to receive such payment somewhat more promptly. While they on occasion also sold foodstuffs in small quantities to poorer and less well-established townsfolk, large planters were usually willing to sell in these circumstances only for ready cash. Town merchants extended long-term credit for foodstuffs purchased, but also ran long list of cash sales. Town provisioning systems thus involved a combination of the more familiar and often personalized credit arrangements that characterized economic transactions in the countryside, but also involved a greater percentage of more impersonal cash transactions. Indeed, since the big area planters continued to make a greater proportion of their incomes from the production of tobacco and grain for export markets than from the sale of food in town, they largely confined their local provisioning trade to more affluent and regular customers. Their slave workers could be much more profitably employed in the fields than in huckstering small quantities of foodstuffs 7 in town. The trade in meat by the pound or in grain by the bushel was thus left largely to a layer of lesser middlemen and mixed entrepreneurs whose role in the provisioning system is discussed in later sections of this report.

B. SOURCES AND EVIDENCE

We chose to concentrate our efforts on Williamsburg and Annapolis because the necessary background research on the local economy and the social and occupational structure were already available. This prior work identified relevant documentary sources, supplied already assembled biographical materials and computerized data bases of tax lists and probate inventories, and also well-documented archaeological assemblages required for this project. Our current results are built on earlier work by several research organizations in the region, supported in part by the National Endowment, including studies of population growth in Williamsburg and Annapolis, their occupational structure, distribution of real and personal wealth, and urban/rural contrasts in living standards.

In order to understand how local planters responded to growing urban markets, we analyzed closely the surviving accounts of three large area planters who progressively altered their productive strategies to make the most of local urban markets. The role of international marketing systems was investigated through analysis of town merchants' accounts. These also turned out to reveal the concurrent role of town storekeepers as intermediate retailers for smaller quantities of locally produced grains, meats, and butter. Some merchants vended as well small amounts of market provisions like poultry and vegetables. Next, we analyzed accounts of private town households and institutional buyers in order to better understand what sorts of foods urban families purchased and from whom. In addition to providing detailed evidence about the food consumption patterns of a few relatively well-documented families at differing economic levels, the household accounts also provide otherwise absent evidence on the significant role of slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in supplying town dwellers with much-desired, highly perishable produce. Analysis of the contents of urban probate inventories revealed the abilities or inabilities of town dwellers at differing levels of wealth to preserve, process, and consume differing kinds and amounts of foods. And study of livestock holdings among all inventoried decedents in the countryside around Williamsburg and Annapolis added to our understanding of changing urban-influenced animal husbandry practices.

We also investigated town market regulations, miscellaneous documentary evidence on intermediate processors such as millers, bakers, and butchers, period manuscript cookbooks, and tax lists (unfortunately available only for the 1780s) for evidence of self-sufficiency or its absence. Compilation of price series for all items of produce for which we could obtain unit prices allowed us to explore major trends in absolute and relative food costs. Finally, collection and careful cross-indexing of a wide variety of documentary sources concerning livestock husbandry practices complements the archaeological findings and constitutes a valuable reference source for future investigations.

Reconstruction of the Chesapeake provisioning system has drawn upon multiple sources, each of which contributes independent pieces of information that are different views on the same topic. Each has its own biases and strengths, but the different sources can inform each other, and 8 together provide a more complete picture of the past. Initially we treated the historical and archaeological data as independent resources, each providing different types of information and bringing different perspectives to bear on questions about the rural production of animals, regional market systems, and the provisioning of urban residents. Given the interdisciplinary character of our research design, however, the principal investigators, from the outset, collaborated closely and continued to relate ongoing work to the central issues. An exciting result has been a greater level of synthesis across sources and disciplines than is commonly found in collaborative urban studies projects.

Bones found in archaeological sites, known as faunal remains to archaeologists, contain important information on a range of food-related topics, including animal husbandry, marketing and distribution of animals and animal products, butchery, food preparation, and diet, or the actual consumption of different meats.

Many historic sources contain information on food and food-related topics, but of all sources available to scholars of Chesapeake history, bones are possibly the best surviving record of past meals. From them it is possible to obtain an overview of the diets of all segments of colonial Chesapeake society since everyone, including the literate and the illiterate, and the wealthy, the poor, and the enslaved threw away bones into trash piles, wells, and abandoned cellars. But like any resource, these bones have biases that must be carefully considered and their evidence weighed. In selecting bone assemblages for study, zooarchaeologists carefully evaluate potential biases, considering field techniques that were used to recover the bones, soil chemistry, exposure to dogs, human feet, and the extended exposure to sun and the elements. By analyzing only those bones that have survived in excellent condition, thus assuring a relatively complete representation of the meat diet, Colonial Williamsburg and other zooarchaeologists working in the Chesapeake have over a period of two decades built up an impressive data base on dietary patterns, animal husbandry, and marketing practices, one that rivals data bases from any region in the country, and possibly the world. For the study of the colonial Chesapeake diet, it has no parallel.

While these faunal remains have provided a broad-based picture of animal husbandry, urban provisioning, and what meats were consumed, patterns revealed in the archaeological record can be interpreted in different ways. Bones, for example, show the proportion of different meats consumed, but identifying how households drew upon differing economic resources and social connections, whether they butchered their own animals, purchased entire carcasses, or purchased special meat cuts, has come from historical sources.

The various historical records have each provided a particular view of how urban households provisioned themselves. Plantation accounts have provided essential information on how livestock were raised and what types of meat were brought into town to be sold in complete carcasses. Household accounts have provided specific information on which meats were purchased in cuts and how beef, veal, and fowl were processed. Probate inventories and tax lists have documented what animals were kept by urban households. Store accounts revealed the foods available for sale by retailers. Manuscript receipt books have provided specific information on special cuts of meat. And municipal records outline market laws and procedures.

Similarly, while the faunal remains have provided an anchor for understanding what different households actually consumed, historical records have provided the economic and social context of consumption. The historical records identified the components of the provisioning system and how they operated in the region. But through analysis of the age of slaughter and different cuts of meat found in faunal assemblages associated with different households in town, faunal remains have provided a more concrete measure of the development of the market and of the degree of household dependency on market resources. Each source has provided its own specific, and sometimes limited, view of provisioning, but together the multiple sources have helped to spell out the different paths individuals took to obtain their food.

A. GENERAL PATTERNS FOR RURAL HOUSEHOLDS

Once the economic and social dislocations accompanying the years of initial European settlement were overcome, in the seventeenth century Chesapeake planters , great, middling, and small, established a system of extensive husbandry centered around the maximum production of tobacco for the European market. Although until well into the eighteenth century most relied almost entirely on Europe for manufactured goods, farming households did achieve a self-sufficiency in basic foods that was probably more complete than that achieved by most farmers in New England, long supposed the quintessential example of household self reliance. New World maize, a crop especially suited to frontier farming, quickly became the predominant starch. Except on newly-established farms, a planter and his wife, along with any bound laborers present in the household could easily raise enough corn to meet the household's food needs without taking away time from the critical tobacco crop. For protein, planters relied primarily on cattle and hogs which multiplied readily in the Chesapeake environment and which could survive, with little care or supplemental feed, on the forage available in woods and old fields. Hogs were briefly fattened with corn in the fall, all but a small breeding stock slaughtered, and the meat salted down to provide a regular supply of protein across much of the year. Cattle were slaughtered from late fall to early winter when range-fed animals still retained annual maximum weight and the meat would keep longest. Generally farmers consumed only older cattle, some of whom had outlived their alternative uses as breeding stock, milk producers, and draft animals. Younger surplus cattle were more often marketed at various times across the year to buyers interested primarily in these alternative uses. Even so, the meat diet of ordinary whites was abundant by European standards.¹

To these basics of bread and meat planters added vegetable gardens for seasonal produce and orchards for fruit and cider. Once their farms were established, rural households at all levels of wealth had little need to purchase foods from others. And given that all but new households were basically self sufficient, planters who had labor enough to raise surplus food had little incentive to do so. Even so there were indeed often surpluses. Planters adopted a strategy of planting sufficient corn to provision their families and dependent laborers in all but the most adverse of growing seasons. So in good years, they often harvested more corn than was needed 12 for bread. And, since they could not allow their herds to grow too large for the available forage, sometimes their increase was more than the household needed for meat. These extra provisions could be sold to new households, to established planters who had added additional new indentured servants or slaves to their work forces, to provision visiting ships, and occasionally exported to the West Indies. By the 1660s and 70s such largely unplanned surpluses had become an important supplementary source of income for established planters, accounting for at least 20% of farm income.²

Towards the end of the seventeenth century large planters throughout the tidewater and many residents in areas marginal for tobacco had begun to pursue a more diversified agriculture. Downturns in the tobacco market and a rising proportion of women and children in the overall population encouraged import replacement and other strategies of diversification. Some small grains were raised which added variety to the diet, cider and brandy production rose, more households began making butter, and large planters integrated sheep into their livestock herds. Thus the components of a customary urban diet had become available at the time viable towns became established.³

We must emphasize that many current economic theories that relate the phenomenon of urban growth to changes in the hinterlands are not applicable to the Chesapeake. In order for a town to grow, either in Europe or in British America, a dependable supply of food had to be routinely available. European economic historians have posited that, once towns were established urban growth then increased the scale of agricultural surpluses by offering the rural sector a range of consumer goods and services that induced farmers to further increase their output in order to satisfy their own ambitions for the citified goods they were offered in payment. Commercialization of agriculture might also lead to increased specialization of function among farmers, with rural producers concentrating on those crops and livestock to which their farms were best suited, and country folk might begin substituting city-manufactured goods for home-produced items.⁴ In the Chesapeake, farmers were already participating in an international economy in which they exchanged cash crops-primarily tobacco, corn, and wheat-for European manufactures and West Indian sugar and rum. These were acquired either from ship captains, country store-keepers, or, in the case of the more affluent, directly from England. Both rural home manufacturing and town industries were limited. Thus local rural/urban exchanges of manufactured goods were of much less importance in the Chesapeake than they were in Europe.

In the mid eighteenth century grains became an increasingly important source of income for large planters. (Small planters often lacked both sufficient land and labor to do anything but continue in the older, tobacco-centered ways.) Rising international grain prices, occasioned by shortages of wheat in Europe and growing slave populations in the West Indies much too numerous to be provisioned with island resources made raising wheat and corn for export an increasingly attractive supplement to tobacco revenues. Substantial corn surpluses (and its by-product, corn fodder) could also be used for fattening livestock either for local sale or for export. 13 Large planters learned that by making more use of plows for preparing ground for and weeding corn they could produce substantial surpluses without cutting back on their tobacco crops. Many middling planters began raising surplus corn as well. Commercial crops of wheat could be produced by the existing plantation work forces if the ground was prepared in the fall, just before and after the tobacco harvest. Extra labor was required only to assist during the brief mid-summer wheat harvest. Then the grain could be threshed during otherwise slack times during the winter.⁵

Other evidence of local economic development could be found along many tidewater streams where large planters were constructing grist mills that served their own plantations and those of smaller neighbors. As the grain trade boomed, some few constructed larger, merchant mills that processed flour and bread for export, as well as grinding grain for local consumption.

Although the mix of crops and production strategies on large plantations were similar throughout the region, big planters living near towns could choose between selling grain in inter-colonial and inter-national markets and selling it locally. With grain prices set, in the case of maize by larger regional markets, and in the case of wheat, by international ones, local sales may not have offered a particular advantage. On the other hand, nearby town populations afforded unusual opportunities to profit handsomely from the sale of grain by-products-fodder and straw-as well as from perishables such as butter. Supplying town dwellers with fuel also presented planters in the immediate area of town another unique opportunity. High overland transport costs made the firewood supply business highly localized. Favorably situated planters, however, stood to make considerable profits, since demand peaked in winter months when their slave workers, carts, and draft animals might otherwise be not fully utilized.

B. RURAL SUPPLIERS OF TOWNS

Chesapeake town residents obtained the bulk of the foods they did not produce themselves from the adjacent countryside. By the late 1730s, when surviving plantation accounts begin, large area slave owners living within one to two hours' travel time from Virginia's capital had emerged as the primary suppliers of the grains, meat, beverages, fodder, and fuel that Williamsburg's inhabitants required. At this time the town was composed of between 50 and 75 households, with permanent town residents numbering less than 500. By 1747/48 the number of households had increased to nearly 100, with the total population estimated to be 885. Even these small numbers were enough to prompt significant restructuring of crop mix and livestock husbandry among those local planters who were abundantly supplied with land and labor. By 1775, when Williamsburg's resident population reached 1,400 living in just under 200 households, production for town markets figured prominently in such planters' management strategies.

The first plantation ledger we analyzed is that James Bray III (by 1715-1744) who owned Littletown, a 1,280 acre plantation on the James/York peninsula about five miles southeast of Williamsburg. See Figure 2.1 for the location. Bray, a third generation Virginia native and a member of a prominent gentry family, owned about 80 slaves at his death.⁶ Like other large 14 tidewater Virginia planters, Bray derived the majority of his income from high quality tobacco produced for the English market. However by the late 1730s he was also supplying Williamsburg residents with substantial amounts of meat, including stall fed beef and mutton, and some grains, cider, and firewood. In the early 1740s he both increased corn production and made a major commitment to wheat. Already Bray was finding it worthwhile to redirect labor time into diversified production for local markets.

A nearly continuous run of accounts, some quite full, and some less complete, document plantation production for the Williamsburg market on adjacent Carter's Grove plantation from 1738 through 1807. Members of the Burwell family farmed the 1,400 acre plantation located about ten miles outside Williamsburg as well as five additional outlying quarters situated nearer the town. Carter's Grove had been purchased by Robert "King" Carter sometime before 1720 as a gift to his daughter Elizabeth, who had married gentry planter Nathaniel Burwell of Gloucester County in 1709. She was to have the income of the plantation, and of the slaves and livestock that her father also provided, for her life and after she died, all was to go to their second son Carter Burwell. Nathaniel Burwell managed the plantation during his lifetime from his Gloucester County estate just across the York River, marketing "fine Stemd Tobo" that had a high reputation among London merchants. After Nathaniel died in 1721, Robert Carter, as acting executor and guardian of the Burwell estate, resumed management of the plantation through an estate agent for the benefit of his daughter and her children. After "King" Carter's death in 1732, a Burwell uncle managed the estate until the heir came of age. During this time Burwell and Carter concentrated almost exclusively on raising tobacco for export, along with enough corn and livestock to feed the resident slaves.⁷

Carter Burwell turned twenty one in the fall of 1737 and married two months later, immediately setting up housekeeping at Carter's Grove. He had a more than favorable start in his career as a planter. The estate was unencumbered, for his mother had died four years before. Besides the land with its complement of livestock and about 25 slaves that his grandfather Carter had supplied, Burwell would add to his labor force other slaves willed to him by his father. Apparently Burwell inherited all the workers he required. His accounts mention some 82 adult slaves between 1740 and 1745, but only two are identified as "new" negroes; presumably he had little need to purchase additional hands. By 1755 his workforce was approaching 150 slaves, about half of whom would have been adult laborers. His wife Lucy's dowry of £250 sterling supplied further capital. With these assets Burwell would acquire another plantation in James City County and three undeveloped tracts further west in Frederick and Prince William Counties. Political office too followed from rank and wealth. Burwell shortly became a justice and a burgess and aspired to, though failed to get, a seat on the Virginia Council.

Carter Burwell began an account book in 1738 when he settled at Carter's Grove which he kept until his death in 1756. Although it is not possible to reconstruct a full accounting of plantation revenues and expenditures from his records, they still tell us a great deal about how he changed the operation of his farms to take advantage of the growing town market. Like many other planters, he failed to record the sales of his tobacco crops, and only occasionally noted sales 15 Figure 2.1. Carter's Grove and Vicinity, c. 1750. of all his surplus corn, wheat, and livestock. Income from cider, wool, and fodder are not mentioned, but there is reason to believe that, as at adjoining Littletown, some must have been marketed. Similarly, major outlays including taxes, clothing for the slaves, and tools are either incompletely recorded or impossible to disentangle from unrelated family expenses.

Like most other large slave owners, Burwell divided his hands into small work groups. There were field laborers quartered at the home house, and additional work units located on two outlying farms and on the newly purchased plantation in James City County. There were also two smaller quarters near Carter's Grove, one managed by a slave and one at the site of a plantation mill, and a group of about five male carpenters seem to have lived and worked separately from the other slaves. Three and sometimes four overseers supervised the larger quarters for shares of the crops produced. A general manager, who worked for an annual salary, directed the overseers, managed the home farm, and often looked after the mill as well. Some of the lesser overseers lasted only a year or so, but several of them and the manager too had longer tenures of five to nine years each. Thus there was unusual continuity in the operation.

Whatever opportunities urban markets presented, the international tobacco market continued to take top priority in the Burwell family's management strategies. Carter Burwell's slaves produced on average between 725 and 965 pounds of tobacco per hand per year, an output comparable to that raised on plantations with no connections to towns. In bad seasons the output might drop to about 550 pounds, while in favorable years the workers sometimes raised over 1300 pounds each. In addition, like many other large tidewater planters, by the late 1730s Burwell began to take advantage of expanding local and international markets for grains. In the 1740s tobacco probably accounted for between two thirds and three quarters of Burwell's revenues from field crops. By the mid 1750s, grains were bringing in more, and tobacco's share may have dropped to about half of gross revenues.

The increases in farm productivity were achieved by making greater use of plows for ground preparation and cultivation and by more fully exploiting the slaves' labor in off seasons. Between 1738 and 1755, on the home farm and adjacent quarters, about 800 barrels of corn were grown annually. Yields per laborer ranged from a low of 5 barrels to a high of 22 barrels; the average crop was 9 to 12 barrels per hand. Although there were many slaves to be fed, and additional corn needed to fatten livestock, between a quarter and a half of the crop was marketable surplus. By the late 1740s Burwell was also growing 500 to 800 bushels of wheat a year, almost all of which was sold. Either Burwell had exceptionally good land or he was using better cultivation techniques than most. In 1755 he was getting 36.6 bushels of wheat to the acre off old tobacco fields, as much as six times the usual yield for the region.

In the 1730s, 40s, and 50s, the Burwell plantation was unusual in its access to a nearby urban market, a situation of which few other tidewater planters could take advantage. Still the crop mix remained typical of most of the large tidewater plantations. However, unlike some other planters of the period who commanded similar amounts of land and labor, Carter Burwell did not invest any of his capital into mines, ships, merchandise, or rental properties-forms of investment that appealed to some of his enterprising rural contemporaries. Given his unusual location, the Williamsburg market apparently offered more certain opportunities.

Livestock too became an increasingly important part of Burwell's operation. Each quarter has its complement of hogs, cattle, and horses, and by 1753 Burwell had at least 250 sheep on two of the farms. Many more animals were raised than were needed for plantation consumption. Each year excess cattle were sold or older animals slaughtered for butcher's meat. Burwell also marketed as much as 10,000 pounds of pork a year. At an average weight of 100 pounds per animal, this represents as many as 100 surplus hogs a year. In the later 1740s and early 1750s when the accounts are fullest, sales of livestock and meat brought in between £50 and £100 sterling constant value annually. Some of the meat may have been destined for the West Indies or sold as ship provision. The bulk, however, went to residents of Williamsburg.

Burwell was producing for several markets, a strategy that spread risk and minimized the impact of price declines for any one of his three staple crops. Almost invariably he consigned his high quality tobacco to London factors in return for English goods; in only one year did he choose to sell tobacco in the country. For corn and wheat there were several outlets. At least once Burwell sold most of his surplus to a ship captain, presumably bound for the West Indies. In years for which the accounts record few grain sales it is likely that Burwell was selling most of his grains in the form of meal and flour processed at his plantation mill. In other years he turned to nearby Williamsburg. The College of William and Mary was his single best customer, sometimes 17 buying over 500 bushels of wheat annually, and paying promptly in cash. Tavern keepers, the royal governor, and assorted town tradespeople and professionals bought up the rest. Doubtless Burwell, himself a graduate of William and Mary, traded on local connections established in school days.

The eldest Burwell son, Nathaniel (1750 1814), was not quite six at his father's death in 1756. Nathaniel's guardian and uncle by virtue of marriage, merchant William Nelson of Yorktown, managed the estate until the boy came of age in 1771. Although Carter's wife Lucy survived him, she took no active role in managing the farms and had moved out of the home house by 1771. Nelson retained Carter Burwell's mix of crops, but began putting more emphasis on products for the local urban market. This strategy satisfied the needs both of a growing resident town population and of increasing numbers of transients who spent more time in the colony's capital as the political crisis worsened.

From 1764, when Nelson's surviving accounts for the estate begin, he was allocating somewhat less labor to raising tobacco than had Carter Burwell, and was putting more into corn, wheat, cider, livestock, butter, and firewood. Nelson probably continued tobacco culture only on the best lands where he could still make quality leaf for the English home market. Between 1763 and 1771 tobacco production per hand in York and James City Counties dropped, while that of other products increased. This was almost certainly a result of conscious policy (except in 1766 and 67 when bad weather shortened crops), rather than of deteriorating soil. The lowland estate tobaccos-all of which were sent to the London firms of Athawes or Cary-continued to fetch top prices, equal to or better than those Nelson received for his own crops grown on fresher lands in Hanover County. The sales, he wrote, ranged from "good" to "extremely pleasing" to "admirable." Since the best soils had now been in periodic cultivation for as much as half a century, the use of some animal manures was probably essential for making good tobacco. The number of cattle and sheep the farms could support would have set an upper bound to the number of acres that could be put in tobacco. Nelson clearly understood the balance; in 1770 he wrote Samuel Athawes: "You make me smile when you talk of the Lands being too much worn & impoverish'd to bring good Tobo-when you know We make more & I trust as good Tobo as We formerly did and I know that a skillful Planter can make it fine from any Land, it being his Part & Interest to improve any that he finds worn or wearing out." Indeed the total volume of estate tobacco rose during Nelson's administration, reaching 95 hogsheads in 1770. But all the increase came from new quarters in Frederick County where transplanted Burwell slaves were making big crops.

Nelson behaved as a typically conservative executor in that he invested little in building repair; made no new investments except for a few head of livestock, primarily horses; and maximized immediate revenues for the support of the Burwell children by hiring out some of the slaves. On the other hand, he must have looked after the farms more closely than the average executor, for under his guardianship levels of salable surpluses rose. Doubtless this was possible in part because Nelson continued to employ several of Carter Burwell's already experienced overseers. Certainly the Burwell slaves worked hard and well. Gross revenues per hand in sterling constant value from field crops alone (incomplete since wheat is missing before 1773 and tobacco in 1774) rose from about £12 in the early 1760s to over £18 between 1769 and 1771. These were higher returns than most large planters had achieved in the 1750s (indeed Carter Burwell 18 had averaged only £10 ½ a hand between 1740 and 1755), and equal to or better than those most resident owners managed in the late 1760s and early 1770s.

Nelson also paid careful attention to exploiting fully the labor of all the slaves year round. Some activities geared especially to the town market-like cutting firewood-could be done by slave men in the winter. Others, like butter making, drew more women into market production. Here Nelson recruited overseer's wives to supervise dairying and paid the couples a share of the butter the wife and the slave women she directed made. By the mid 1760s the estate was producing butter on a level equivalent to a middling size Pennsylvania dairy of the mid nineteenth century. Some of the slave women acquired new domestic skills usually reserved for whites, while overseer's wives gained an opportunity to supplement family income.

Nelson's records of the operations of the Burwell estate are more complete than those of either the father or the son, for in his case there were legal obligations for full accounting. Indeed, Nelson carefully recorded local sales and expenditures, but like most other contemporary planters, failed to account for the tobacco crop or for the goods imported with the proceeds. These transactions were preserved in the form of loose accounts received from English correspondents which have not survived. Since accounts with overseers for their shares of the tobacco and corn crops, an alternative source of information on production, are also incomplete, total plantation revenues and expenditures cannot be calculated. From the information available, it appears that in the 1760s tobacco continued to account for about half of gross plantation revenues, and sales of surplus corn another third. Lesser sources of income came from wheat, livestock, butter, cider, fodder, wood, and rents.

With his inheritance of Carter's Grove and associated quarters in York and James City Counties (altogether 4,588 acres), over 6,000 acres with two quarters in Frederick County, and between 150 and 200 slaves, Nathaniel Burwell ranked as one of the major planters of the lower York. He entered grammar school at William and Mary in 1759 at age nine and remained there until he secured a college degree. Nathaniel began active management of the estate in 1771, and was completely on his own after William Nelson's death in November 1772. In the same month Nathaniel married Susannah Grymes, daughter of a Middlesex County planter. Because there was some ambiguity in his father's will about how the profits of the estate were to be divided, Nathaniel decided to remain in college through the fall of 1772. As Nelson explained, "Nat doth not chuse to marry & go to House keeping till he is sure of something before hand; which I look upon, among others, as an Instance of his Prudence & Good Sence." The "something before hand" Nathaniel sought presumably included not only a two thirds share of estate balances in the hands of London factors but also Susannah's marriage portion of £800. Unfortunately father Grymes paid nothing but £40 interest a year until 1785, and still in 1787, after Grymes' death, part of Susannah's dowry remained uncollected. Nelson, in contrast, had accumulated sufficient reserves with London factors to pay the Carter girls' dowries as they married, and Nathaniel paid his remaining sister's marriage portion as well as all the women's shares of their brother Carter's estate promptly.

Indeed, family concerns may always have counted most with Nathaniel. While accepting the public duties expected of a man of his rank (he became a justice of the peace and a vestryman in 1772), and subsequently supporting the American cause as a member of the James City County committee of safety in 1775, as county lieutenant during and after the war, and as a delegate to the state Constitutional ratifying convention in 1788, Nathaniel did not assume a prominent public 19 role at any time in his career. Perhaps managing his estate and raising the eight children (two of whom died in infancy) that Susannah bore was enough.

Nathaniel increasingly turned his home farm into a specialized unit geared to the comfortable living of its owner. By 1774 he had ceased to cultivate tobacco at Carter's Grove, and raised only enough corn for plantation use. Instead he grew more wheat and large quantities of oats to feed his horses, along with small patches of peas and barley. Quite possibly he had made improved meadows. The Nelsons grew both clover and timothy, and as early as 1769 William had had sufficient experience with clover to report "it makes fine Pasturage & helps to recover Land by feeding it." Nathaniel likely followed Nelson's example. There was also more domestic production on the adjacent quarters. At Foaces and New Quarter Nathaniel continued to grow tobacco, though in decreasing quantities, and large crops of corn and wheat. Each quarter also made surplus pork, beef, wool, cider, and butter. Hogs and beeves were fattened at the quarters, not exclusively at the home farm, and the overseers had some responsibility for marketing meat, cider, and butter in town. In 1772 Nathaniel built a new plantation mill and by 1775-76 was selling wheat, flour, and corn meal to neighbors and to townsfolk in Williamsburg and Yorktown. The grain came mostly from his own farms or was purchased from a few local planters; his was not a large scale merchant mill geared to the export trade.

In addition to his interests in the tidewater, Nathaniel also set about developing his quarters in Frederick County. In 1771 he settled additional slaves in the west. There, where soils were fresh, Nathaniel's slaves could make bigger tobacco crops than in the tidewater. Indeed, if the farms were to be profitable they had to, for the price of upland tobacco was often lower than that of York County leaf, and the expense of wagoning to the nearest warehouse high. The quarters also produced considerable quantities of corn, though most was required for plantation consumption. On the other hand, sales of wheat, rye, oats, and livestock supplemented tobacco revenues. During the war Nathaniel also made crops of flax and hemp. Because the Frederick plantations were so far away, Burwell had to find good managers and to allow them considerable latitude in marketing crops. The overseers handled sales of everything but tobacco and periodically sent Burwell the proceeds.

Unfortunately Nathaniel's accounting procedures were rather haphazard. Many entries in plantation daybooks and ledgers record only receipts or disbursements of cash for unspecified purposes, while other transactions (with overseers for example), indicate only the balance remaining after periodic settlements and reveal nothing of the flow of transactions. In 1774 and 1775 Nathaniel attempted to measure the net profits of the various quarters, but his calculations omitted nearly as much as they included. He counted the total corn crops as revenue and then subtracted what was consumed by humans and animals as expenses, for example, but recorded only marketed surpluses of livestock, cider, and butter as revenue, while ignoring other produce such as firewood completely. He included as costs the overseers' shares and allowances of corn and meat as well as seed requirements, but did not consider expenditures for clothing, tools, taxes, and salaried workers. Burwell did not repeat this attempt, and indeed his struggles to calculate annual profit or loss for his much less complicated milling operation shows that complex accounting was not his strong point.

Over time, Nathaniel seems to have left more of the day to day accounting to his steward and to the various overseers once he had gotten an idea of how things were going. In 1776 for example, he carefully recorded sales of large amounts of milk to Williamsburg residents; no sales 20 are recorded for later years though it seems unlikely that none was sold. He also began to leave the details of the firewood business to overseers and wagoners. Nathaniel kept sufficient records so that he could keep track of what was going on, but had no interest in recording more detail than was necessary for his own understanding. The materials on which he based his cryptic ledger entries were preserved either in the form of loose papers or in steward's daybooks which have not survived. Such plantation revenues as Nathaniel recorded are shown in Table 2.1.

How did Nathaniel and his family cope with the Revolution? The only evidence of intense patriotic commitment was a contribution of 50 bushels of wheat sent for the relief of Boston in 1774. Thereafter he did the best he could in uncertain circumstances, and in fact did very well indeed-Nathaniel seems always to have had a sharp eye for new opportunities. He curtailed his tobacco crops, which he could no longer be sure of selling, beginning in 1776. Later crop allocations are uncertain, for Nathaniel stopped paying his overseers in shares between 1778 and 1781, but it is likely he planted little tobacco, concentrating instead on surer things.

While imported goods were scarce and expensive, Nathaniel's location guaranteed him first chance at whatever came in. This allowed him to keep his slaves working at things that would turn a profit, not just provide subsistence. Getting enough salt, for example, was surely a problem, but buy it he did through 1777. By the end of the year he commenced limited salt production, but only enough for plantation use. Somehow he managed to lay hands on enough ready made cloth to clothe the slaves. Before the war few local whites were spinning and weaving for wages-in 1771 and 72 Nathaniel hauled surplus wool from the peninsula farms west to Frederick County in order to sell it. In 1775 he tried growing some cotton and probably assigned some old slave women and younger girls to spinning that and the plantation's wool. However, his accounts show no sign of the all out effort, so evident on plantations further up the bay, to make most or all essential coarse cloth. And, although he paid an outrageous price for it, the white family continued the luxury of drinking tea throughout the war.

So long as Williamsburg remained the state's capital, the town market was the first recourse. Nathaniel sold large amounts of meat, fodder, meal, flour, cider, butter, and milk to urban tavern keepers and professionals. In 1776 and 77 he sold most of the flour his mill ground to two commercial bakers. He began using bran, a byproduct of milling, to fatten extra hogs. Responding to an increased demand for firewood, Nathaniel cut down so much timber one suspects his farms may have been seriously depleted of cover by the end of the war. In 1776 alone his slaves carried over 2,000 cartloads of firewood, worth over £475 sterling constant value, into town, most of it sold to the state government. Nathaniel next traded in whisky, suddenly in great demand as supplies of West Indian rum dried up. In 1776 he had a distillery built in Frederick County and by the next year was receiving regular shipments back east. This he retailed, along with locally made cider, in town and at his mill. In 1776 his gross revenues from the tidewater farms exceeded £1000 sterling constant value, exclusive of the value of foodstuffs consumed on the home farm and quarters. A third enterprise was transportation. Beginning in 1779 he employed a wagoner to haul goods for himself and for hire both around the neighborhood and back and forth from Frederick County.

The removal of the capital to Richmond must have been a blow, and indeed, Nathaniel's accounts suggest that sales of butter, wood, and fodder declined considerably in 1780 and 1781. (Records are incomplete for 1778 and 79.) On the other hand, in 1779 he was able to sell a backlog of accumulated tobacco. Nathaniel promptly deposited much of the questionable paper money he received in the state treasury, and soon used the rest to pay off debts or to speculate in produce. In 1781 the French army arrived to assist in Cornwallis's defeat at Yorktown, and Nathaniel was able to sell food and whisky to officers and commissary agents for welcome French gold. By 1782 (if not before) he had reestablished ties with remaining Williamsburg residents. Frequent sales of flour, whisky, meat, and wood to townspeople resumed, while Williamsburg's mental hospital (Nathaniel served on its board of governors) provided an additional customer. From firewood alone Nathaniel grossed between £130 and £150 sterling constant value annually between 1782 and 1784 . His daybook suggests that 1782 was an exceptionally good year, although one cannot be sure that this reflects anything more than a spate of unusually diligent record keeping. Another cache of tobacco yielded a return of over £300 sterling constant value, while the whisky business contributed a similar amount. Nathaniel also purchased a share in a ship (possibly a privateer) in 1780, and in an unidentified "factory" sponsored by the Nelson family in 1783. His profits from these ventures, if any, cannot be traced.

Overall, the Burwells appear to have suffered remarkably little from the war. Their favorable location near the mouth of the bay enabled them to keep on buying imported cloth and for a time, salt, despite acute shortages elsewhere. And while they could not count on making much from tobacco, they could rely on continued sales of grain, firewood, livestock products, and liquor to Williamsburg and Yorktown residents, markets more augmented than curtailed by the war. Finally, they were lucky. While many area planters suffered heavy losses to the British in 1781, there is no evidence of enemy depredations at Carter's Grove. Legend has it that Tarleton occupied the farm that spring, and indeed recent archaeological excavations uncovered a brass insignia with his family crest in the vegetable garden. But if the enemy did raid the farm, Burwell apparently had ample warning. His accounts suggest no significant damage, much less the loss of any slaves. All in all the family benefited much more than it lost from its location.

With the return of peace, there were new commercial opportunities, and these inevitably included tobacco. By 1784 Nathaniel could import over £500 sterling worth of English manufacturers from long time family factor Samuel Athawes, with all but a fraction of the cost balanced by a favorable pre war credit. In 1785 he repaired his mill. And between 1787 and 1789 Nathaniel for the first time in his career plunged directly into commerce, acting as a tobacco agent for the London firm of Rowles, Grymes, and Company.

Burwell also began increasing tobacco production on his own farms in the early 1780s, and by 1789 was making crops per hand similar to those pitched before the war. While his lands had been cultivated for over half a century, he still had some extremely productive patches. York River tobacco prices dropped in 1789, and Nathaniel ceased buying tobacco from others, but he continued to grow full crops on his own farms into the early 1790s. Because post war accounts do not record the size of grain crops, we cannot compare gross revenues per hand with pre war receipts. By 1787 revenues per hand from tobacco, sterling constant value, again equaled those of the 1760s. If Burwell was also able to match pre war levels of grain production-and continued to produce butter, wood, cider and meat for town markets-he probably did nearly as well after the war as before.

After the Revolution, Burwell spent more and more time and invested ever more capital in his Frederick County holdings, including several merchant mills and a distillery. After his first wife's death in 1788 Nathaniel quickly remarried, and thereafter the white family spent most of each year at the main Frederick County farm. Burwell appreciated the greater opportunities for estate building that the west offered, and surely his need to augment his fortune increased along with his family. In addition to six children surviving from his first marriage, Nathaniel and his second wife had another eight offspring between 1789 and 1805. Burwell removed most of the agricultural laborers from Carter's Grove in late 1796 or early 1797. Thereafter only enough adult workers remained at the Grove to keep the great house running, care for the livestock, maintain the garden and orchards, and perhaps to raise some small grains. Nathaniel turned over the old home plantation to his oldest son, Carter III (1773-1819), in 1804. Unlike his father, who had begun running his estate at majority, Carter Burwell III had to wait until he was thirty-one before obtaining title to his inheritance. This included twelve adult slaves and perhaps as many children. The Burwell family had long relied on income from the adjacent quarters to maintain a high standard of living at the Grove, and with these eventually parceled out among other family members, the 1,135 acres and twelve taxable slaves attached to the home farm could not produce returns sufficient to maintain later heirs in the style of the father and grandfather. In addition, 23 Nathaniel may have demanded, as he did of at least one other of his sons, that Carter pay him part of the value of the lands he inherited. If so, the tidewater estate would have been further encumbered with debt. At any rate Carter III barely outlived his father, leaving as his only heir a minor son, "unhealthy and much spoiled." Carter's widow, her second husband, and a series of administrators ran through most of the estate's assets. They hired out and probably eventually sold off the remaining the bonds people.

Nathaniel Burwell intended the York County quarters to descend eventually to other of his heirs, but the estate was not fully settled until after his widow's death in 1843. An estate manager, increasingly in charge during Burwell's frequent absences, directed the eastern division, with overseers supervising work at Foaces and New Quarters, and a miller running a grist mill and eventually a distillery at Mill Quarter. Between 1801 and 1805 a younger son, another Nathaniel who would soon inherit farms in Frederick County, took over direction of these quarters as part of his training as a plantation manager. By and large the son deferred to the direction of his father and to that of the general manager.

Unlike most other York peninsula planters who dropped tobacco in the 1790s, the elder Nathaniel Burwell continued to grow the weed on the best quarter lands into the 1800s. At Foaces and New Quarter the field hands could still raise high quality crops that continued to fetch top prices on the London market. The quarter soils were good enough to permit relatively high annual yields (for the area) of about 675 pounds per laborer. Wheat and corn remained the other major cash crops, with oats, barley, and clover hay cultivated mainly for plantation use. Williamsburg continued to offer an outlet for wood, beef, and pork; however, in contrast to the 1770s and 1780s, such sales seem not to have amounted to much. Instead, the Burwells marketed most of their surplus grain through Norfolk and Baltimore. Perhaps marketing opportunities contracted once Williamsburg was no longer the state capital and its population stagnated. But the Burwells or their agents may have found it easier to sell most surplus crops to two or three wholesale merchants, who by the turn of the century usually paid in cash in timely installments, rather than making deliveries to dozens of townspeople who were accustomed to paying off their debts more slowly and irregularly.

Guardian accounts for estates of five middling York County planters administered between 1735 and 1764 allow us to compare the operation of smaller farms on the York River peninsula with that of Littletown and Carter's Grove. All of the decedents were landholders who owned about 300 acres each, who had between four and eight adult slave field hands, and who left personal estates of between £100 and £400 sterling constant value. These accounts reflect the most conservative management practices of the period, for guardians were required only to maintain the value of the estate, to produce enough income to maintain the orphans, and to avoid any risks that might jeopardize the orphans' future inheritance. So it is not surprising to find that almost nothing was put into new buildings or livestock and that none of the guardians invested in additional slaves. Still, these accounts reveal that by the 1730s, even small York County plantations had become somewhat diversified operations. Diary products, cider, fodder, and wool were probably produced on all the farms, and some had modest surpluses for sale. Most too raised more livestock than were required for plantation needs. All of the estates also grew a little wheat, and most made a surplus of corn. Revenues from these sources, however, were small, for the surpluses were never very large. Tobacco was by far the most important source of income for four of the five estates, accounting for 55% to 82% of gross revenues from field crops, and up to 24 72% of total gross revenues. Only on one estate in the early 1760s did income from grains exceed that from tobacco.

Comparison of these smaller farms with the much larger operation at Carter's Grove suggests that there were definite economies of scale. Supervision was a prime example. Only when there were enough field hands to make up work groups of six or more was it likely to pay to employ an overseer. In addition, the variety of tasks that had to be performed on these somewhat diversified farms clearly cut into the time that could be devoted to tobacco. Carter Burwell's field laborers produced roughly 850 pounds of tobacco, 10 ½ barrels of corn, and perhaps 10 bushels of wheat a year. Annual gross revenues per field hand from the three major crops were about £10 sterling constant value. On the orphan's estates, adult slaves made only about 385 pounds of tobacco, a bushel or so of wheat, and about five barrels of corn per hand. Total gross revenues from all plantation products averaged only £5 per hand per year. Where there were only a few hands to plow the land, look after the livestock, run the dairy, shear the sheep, spin yarn, gather fodder, catch fish, make cider, plant a vegetable garden, sow and harvest wheat, beans and peas, tend corn, make cask, and keep fences and buildings in repair, most of the slaves could not tend a full crop of tobacco as well. In the seventeenth century, many such secondary activities had been foregone on orphans' plantations, and free whites hired to do all the carpentry and coopering. However, on the York County estates in the 1740s, 50s, and 60s, diversified activities like dairying, wheat culture, and sheep raising were continued in the absence of the white family. Then such surpluses could be sold in town markets. On farms where the owner's family was present, however, most of these products were likely consumed on the plantation.

C. LIVESTOCK HUSBANDRY

Determining when planters adopted specialized husbandry techniques aimed at producing livestock for sale to urban markets begins with a basic understanding of animal husbandry in the Chesapeake. Particularly since the specialized production of livestock evolved directly out of the region's plantation economy, a basic understanding of the underlying structure of animal husbandry, including how domestic livestock were reared and cared for, and the important role they played in subsistence on the plantation, is a necessary first step in the study of urban provisioning. Towards this end Bowen and her colleagues in the Department of Archaeological Research have carefully analyzed numerous archaeological faunal assemblages from the lower Chesapeake and combined this data with data from other sites that were previously analyzed by several specialists not associated with Colonial Williamsburg (Fig. 2.2). After two years of hard work, approximately fifty faunal assemblages have been analyzed, and of these, the largest, best preserved, and most tightly-dated have been combined to form one large data base broken into significant historical periods matching those established by Henry Miller, Lorena Walsh, and Lois Carr. Already the general outline of the herding system and periods when significant changes occurred are clear, although the continued analysis of these assemblages and additional research will eventually enable scholars to outline in great detail how animal husbandry evolved over a two-hundred-year period.

The presence of domesticated livestock in the Chesapeake landscape was pervasive, beginning at Jamestown with the earliest arrivals of settlers, who brought with them cattle, pigs, goats, horses, and sheep to provide food, labor, and transportation. How these animals were 25 sustained in a world that lacked pastures, fences, and protective barns, however, has been misinterpreted. For the most part, it is believed that livestock were given little or no supplemental foods and they were allowed to range freely through the woodlands. The only clear controls were some fences, which were built to keep them out of fields of corn and tobacco.⁸

Europe has a long and well-established traditional husbandry system that intermixes the cultivation of plants with the raising of livestock. On pastures and on fields after harvest, cattle, sheep, and other livestock graze, leaving their manure to fertilize the soil. Formerly pigs also fed in forests surrounding farms and villages. How Chesapeake colonists faced the problem of feeding livestock in the New World has been interpreted in terms of this tradition. Since livestock were allowed to graze and browse unsupervised in the unused woodlands surrounding the fields, some have viewed this woodland management system as a non-herding system, that is, the only control was to fence them out of valuable fields and orchards. But the system that evolved incorporated forms of traditional husbandry, which had been present in Britain for many generations, into the Native American landscape.

Domestication studies have guided this research.⁹ Biologists and archaeologists studying domestication have shown that by managing the feeding, breeding, and care of a population, livestock become more or less isolated from their wild progenitors. In effect, humans insert themselves as the dominant leader over herds. Without some form of control, natural selection would again become the predominant force. Coloring and other physical traits present in the domestic form would revert to characteristics of the wild progenitor, and livestock that had once been domesticated would return to a feral, or wild state.

Colonial livestock were not feral, since settlers could and did distinguish between those they controlled and those they did not. Numerous documentary references describe livestock that were tame and those that were wild, who they referred to as the "wild gang." Period documents describe wild stallions who stole mares for their harem, and wild cattle herds, who "resorted in company with tame cattle."¹⁰ Given this reality, our research came to focus on identifying specifically how colonists created a herding system in a Native American landscape by constructing a system of fences and other man-made barriers that would support an open woodlands form of husbandry.

Figure 2.2 Location of archaeological sites analyzed for the project.

When settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607 to establish plantations, they encountered Native American settlements that were composed of houses and palisaded towns with adjacent fields. Surrounding these settlements were woodlands, which were cleared of small wood and old trees for firewood and fired to clear the underbrush, where enemies could conceal themselves. So effective was this clearing that John Smith wrote in 1608 "a man may gallop a horse amongst these woods any waie, but where the creekes or Rivers shall hinder."¹¹ Also present in this landscape were old fallow fields, which created for the newly introduced livestock rich meadows composed of indigenous weeds, and pine and hardwood forests, which held acorns and the many tubers pigs thrive on.¹² When woodlands were burned, there were plentiful grasses and browse for cattle, horses, and goats. Beaches along the local streams and rivers provided access to shellfish, and mudflats and marsh zones provided shellfish, rushes, and cattails - all rich food for swine, cattle, horses, and goats.

Zooarchaeological data shows that by the 1620s herds of cattle and swine in the lower Chesapeake thrived and that they were capable of supporting the local human population (Fig.2.3). Based on useable meat weight estimates, domesticated animals composed 77% of the total meat diet during the period 1620-1660, and by 1660-1700, 91% of the total meat diet. According to Miller and others, colonists continued to hunt, but the growth of the plantations leveled forests and destroyed an ideal deer habitat.¹³ In lieu of this diminishing resource, domestic livestock became increasingly important. It has also been suggested that the decline in deer populations was the result of the introduced competitors for their food. Through grazing and browsing, cattle, horses, swine, and goats did much to damage the native deer habitat.¹⁴

Documents support the archaeological evidence, showing in the Virginia Company records that livestock populations increased rapidly. In a memorandum to England dated 1616, colonists claimed they were able to maintain themselves with food.¹⁵ In a 1619 census record, this view is reinforced by a description of 120 humans, 500 cattle, some horses and goats, and an 28 Figure 2.3 Relative dietary importance in the Chesapeake 1620-1700; wild vs. domestic species (based on usable meat weight). infinite number of swine. Another census taken two years later showed the number of cattle had increased to 800.¹⁶

So successful was this woodland herding system that by the 1622 uprising, when local Native Americans killed half the European and livestock populations, livestock had established themselves to the point that colonists could rely upon domestic meat, rather than wildlife, as a primary resource (Fig.2.4). During the first half of the seventeenth century, herds of cattle had stabilized and contributed on the average 51% of the useable meat weight to the diet, while swine herds contributed 22%. Caprines (including both sheep and goats), which were present only in small numbers, contributed only 1%.

Biological evidence for the success of herds can be found in these records. In 1619 John Pory wrote that cattle "do mightily increase here, both kine, hogges and goates, and are much greater in stature, than the race of them first brought out of England. No lesse are our horses and mares likely to multiply, which proove of a delicate shape, and of as good spirite and metall." Another wrote "the cattell already there are much encreased and thrive exceedingly with the pasture…though the ground was covered most with snow, and the season sharpe, lived without other feeding than the grasse they found…."¹⁸

Figure 2.4. Relative dietary Importance, rural Chesapeake 1620-1660. Based on usable meat weight.

Both predators and Native Americans were serious threats to livestock. To protect their animals colonists placed them on islands and built palisades across peninsulas. As early as 1611 palisades were run from river to river to secure hogs and cattle.¹⁹ One is reported to have been four miles long, "with twenty miles for cattle and hogs to circuit in."²⁰ Particularly during the first years of settlement, structures were also built to protect them. As early as 1611 Sir Thomas Dale requested that a "stable for our horses... and a block house be built to prevent the Indians from killing the cattle."²¹

The early Virginia Company records, together with legal documents and a handful of diary and traveler accounts, provide evidence from which it is possible to develop a sense of the herding system. Controls existed over all livestock, even swine. A law in 1640 required "hoggs to be confined in pens by night and watched by keepers during the day or owner to satisfie all damages done by them."²² But more so than any other species, swine were allowed to run in the woods throughout the seventeenth century, as Robert Beverly reported, "Hogs swarm like Vermine upon the Earth..[They] run where they list, and find their own Support in the Woods, without any Care 30 of the Owner…."²³ This notion of running loose in the woods, however, must be viewed from the animal's perspective. From the perspective of wild and feral populations today, running loose means living within a well-defined home range, which will be expanded only in times of extreme food shortages.²⁴ According to biologist Caroline Grigson, pigs are recalcitrant nomads, who given a desirable food source will remain sedentary. Human sources of food such as peach orchards and newly harvested cornfields could easily have brought swine in from the woodlands in time for fattening for the fall butchering.

It is clear colonists capitalized on the social behavior of pigs. Young pigs tend to stay in a herd with the adult females, while the adult boars go off on their own, taking up with sows only during rut season.²⁵ Beverley recognized this social nature when he remarked that if "a Proprietor could find and catch the Pigs, or any part of a Farrow," then they could claim ownership of all that ran together, since they were aware that pigs of the same litter stayed together. Beverley noted, "as they are bred in Company, so they continue to the End."²⁶ Thus, it clear that within the free range system there were natural controls that restricted the movements of swine.

Other forms of control described in the documents include castrating the older boars; marking individuals to establish ownership; and requiring substantial fences be kept around fields, where pigs could be kept in after harvest. It appears there were few changes in pig husbandry during the seventeenth century, since there appears to be an overall consistency in the records, but it may well be that as the century progressed some owners had begun to keep a closer watch on their hogs.

This herding system is strikingly similar to an ancient form of pig husbandry that was present in Britain for hundreds of years. Known as pannage husbandry, pigs were kept in large numbers wherever there were sufficient forests.²⁷ Often pigs were born at home during the spring. When they were weaned at three months they were sent to the woods to feed alongside their elders on mast, tubers, rhizomes, herbaceous plants, insects, birds, and carrion. There they remained until the end of the mast season, when they were brought in December.²⁸ At times when mast was scarce, pigs were allowed to root around parks, and to graze on stubble in fields after harvest, and on whatever surplus agricultural produce was available. As in the New World these pigs had great freedom, but they were not "wild," a fact that Trow-Smith reinforces by stating that "pasturing of pigs at virtually free range either in wood or upon the open waste presupposes a close control of their movements, and ability to drive them in for shelter from prey or for 31 slaughter or for castration or for several other reasons that require pigs to be confined and handled…."²⁹

Even when left in the woodlands, constraints were used in the form of pens, where swine were kept by night.³⁰ So successful was this herding system that it was not until the late eighteenth century, when woodlands had decreased in many parts of Britain, and the commercial production of pigs had increased, that pig keeping diverged from pannage husbandry to a more controlled system based on penning.

During the early years of settlement, Jamestown colonists focused their commercial interests on creating fields to grow tobacco and other crops, leaving the herding of livestock as a subsistence-related activity, rather than a potential source of profit. Building on pannage husbandry, they introduced swine into a Native American landscape that included woodlands similar to those they had known in Britain. Swine had to be protected from predation, which they accomplished by pasturing them on islands and building palisade lines across peninsulas, but other methods colonists used to manage swine all had origins in their homeland. They had to be fenced out of corn fields during the growing season, but this had also been a problem for the British, who alleviated crop damage by passing even during the seventh century laws requiring individuals to fence out stock from their crops. In medieval times, farmers restrained pigs from grazing on the commons during certain times of the year using pens, fences, and hedges.³¹ In the New World, with the protection of islands and palisades in the ideal wooded environment, pigs adapted so successfully that feral herds developed and colonists' herds proliferated, in spite of losses to predators and Native Americans.

Cattle husbandry appears to have been defined within the parameters set out in the woodlands husbandry system. In Britain there also was a precedent for woodlands-based husbandry that permitted communal use. In areas where woodlands were common, cattle were allowed to graze alongside swine; in areas where mixed agriculture was practiced, cattle were allowed to graze freely on common woods and fields after harvest. Here in the Chesapeake, cattle also were allowed to graze freely, although in comparison to swine herding, colonists kept a relatively close watch on them, for every reference clearly distinguishes hogs-and not cattle-being "in the woods." Following an ancient precedent that has been traced back to prehistoric times, livestock were restrained by stock enclosures that ranged from as much as 1,000 acres to less than 12 acres, that were defined by boundary earthworks and reinforced by timber fences.³²

In the Chesapeake, during the early years when Native Americans were a serious threat, colonists took great care to protect their cattle from marauders by keeping them within palisade boundaries, penning them near homes, and even keeping them in their houses.³³ But even after the threat had subsided, cattle were managed. Those kept on islands and on peninsulas protected by 32 palisade lines found ample, relatively secure grazing lands that in some cases were at least 20 square miles in size.³⁴ To maintain control within these boundaries, ownership of cattle was maintained by branding and earmarks, and they were herded, as one statute stated, "Catle [should] be kept in heards waited and attended on by some small watch or so enclosed by them selues that they destroy not yor corne and other seed provisions…."³⁵ Other management techniques included penning calves close to home, where their mothers would return from the forest to nurse them and pens which were used in fields and pastures to restrain cattle movements. As early as 1609 there are references to oxen, who require constant attention and training from birth to work as a team. But even though these management techniques are well documented, many, or maybe even most, colonists left cattle to graze with little supervision, as the Frenchman Durand commented in 1687, "their animals all graze in the woods or on the untilled portions of their plantations, where they seek shelter nightly rather by instinct than from any care given them."³⁶

Early on colonists introduced goats, which can withstand predators better than sheep, produce milk readily, and will browse on a quite diverse diet. Here in the Chesapeake, goats assisted in clearing pastures and woodlands by browsing, and provided milk to male colonists who were not used to doing the female task of milking cattle. By mid-century, however, sheep began to replace goats, even though in 1658 goats still outnumbered sheep.³⁷

Sheep were extremely important in Britain of course, where they had been relied upon for centuries. Whether colonists postponed introducing sheep until predators had largely been exterminated, or whether sheep were introduced only when sufficient pastures had been created by felling forests, is not clear. Unfortunately, there are few indications in the early records of how either goats or sheep were herded, although a 1666 law required adequate fencing for "sheep and other cattle", an indication that the two were pastured together on pastures and fallow fields.³⁸ Durand de Dauphine's 1687 description reinforces this view in his description of cows, sheep, and horses who grazed together on wheat fields.³⁹ In all probability, the herding of sheep and cattle were intertwined. Mary Beaudry, in her dissertation on Chesapeake probate inventories, drew attention to this shift when she observed a change in the manner in which cattle were listed. By 33 the last quarter of the seventeenth century, cows were often referred to by their names, a sign that owners had established a greater familiarity with their animals.⁴⁰

This herding system, which incorporated many elements of management techniques colonists had known in Britain, underwent few changes during the seventeenth century. A reading of historical texts shows that with the exception of the wealthiest elite, planters continued to allow livestock to graze freely in the available woodlands, marshes, and on fallow fields, providing them almost no housing and little or no supplemental feed. Those wealthy individuals such as Landon Carter, who began to engage in the commercial production of livestock during the first half of the eighteenth century, were probably exceptions.

If an assessment of herding systems is based exclusively on the historical texts available for this study, then the only possible conclusion would be that no significant change in husbandry occurred even for the wealthy planters until the eighteenth century. The analysis of the archaeological remains of livestock and systematic reconstruction of slaughter patterns from the remains of cattle, swine, and caprines, however, paints a slightly different picture, one that shows that subtle changes occurred. Since many of the assemblages analyzed for this study are the deposits of wealthier planters, they provide an ideal measure for determining how wealthy planters adapted their herding methods to changing conditions and new market demands.

The approach taken in this analysis is synthetic; each source of information provides an independent measure of past behavior with its own peculiarities, biases, and strengths. If each source is carefully considered in terms of what it can, and cannot tell about the past, then the analyst is in a position to incorporate the strengths and to produce a more viable interpretation of the past. Following this approach, documentary and archaeological evidence can tell the story of how animal husbandry evolved in the Chesapeake, and how it adapted ancient elements to a Native American landscape to form a coherent herding system that managed swine, cattle, caprines, and horses.

The zooarchaeological data includes diversity assessments, and slaughter age data based on both epiphyseal fusion and tooth wear assessments. The strength of this data base is that slaughter ages monitors change in livestock husbandry, but while it is a very sensitive barometer, it can not identify the causative factor or factors, which can include diet, changes in the environment, herding system, or intended use for the animal.⁴¹

The historical data base for this project draws upon animal husbandry information from probate inventories from York County in Virginia and Anne Arundel County in Maryland, plus descriptions of husbandry found in the Virginia Company records, legal documents from both Virginia and Maryland, diaries of elite planters, and the plantation records of two progressive planters from the region, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Information from probate inventories, which record at the time of death the number of livestock and to varying degrees of 34 specificity the ages of different types of livestock, provide a much needed independent assessment of the archaeological data. The rich textual data pulled from numerous other sources, which describes management techniques used by the wealthy, laws concerning the care of livestock, and general descriptions of husbandry, bring to light the specifics of the herding system. Together with the archaeological data, this historical information can help to identify the husbandry techniques and various causative factors contributing to the change. When combined with documentary evidence on husbandry, which reflects the husbandry of the wealthy, the picture that is emerging is bolstered by several independent data bases.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with the archaeological data base, a brief discussion of the principles underlying aging methods is in order. Since the age at which an animal is killed is related to a specific use or combination of uses, the age at which livestock were slaughtered is key to any understanding of husbandry and the economic and environmental forces that drive it. For example, when cattle or sheep are raised for multiple purposes, as they are in subsistence-oriented economies, they are slaughtered only after they have served their purpose. But if livestock are raised for sale, then farmers shift to using husbandry methods that are efficient at producing one product economically. Slaughter ages reflect these specialized purposes. Thus, it is presumed that when the purpose for raising an animal changes, so too will the age at which livestock are slaughtered.

Two methods were used to determine slaughter ages. The first is assessing the extensiveness of wear on mandibular teeth.⁴² Since teeth are the most resilient of all mammalian bone, this method is thought to be extremely reliable.⁴³ The second method is measuring the degree of fusion of mammalian long bones.⁴⁴ On either end of a long bone shaft are "epiphyses" that fuse to the shaft at a known stage during the maturation process. Since different epiphyses fuse at different times, zooarchaeologists use large assemblages that contain elements in proportions roughly even to that of the normal skeleton to determine the different age groups represented in the assemblage. However, because young immature bone is said to be the most susceptible to damaging taphonomic factors such as dog chewing, there is a potential for some bias in the data reflecting and skewing toward older animals.

Both methods require large samples of ageable material that have not been significantly altered by either exposure to harsh weather or to damage by humans and animals. Since faunal assemblages from North America tend to be extremely small in comparison to assemblages from Europe and the Near East, analysis has therefore tended to focus on epiphyseal fusion rather than tooth wear, since the number of long bones is generally greater than the number of ageable mandibles. Consequently, for all previously analyzed assemblages only the fusion data are available. For assemblages analyzed for this project, plus others where mandibles could be easily pulled for study, tooth wear analyses were performed. To provide yet a third independent measure 35 Figure 2.5. Domestic cattle kill-of pattern based on long bone fusion. Figure 2.6. Domestic cattle kill-off pattern based on tooth wear. of livestock slaughter patterns, livestock entries from seventeenth and eighteenth-century probate inventories were analyzed.⁴⁵ For more complete technical descriptions of each method and the analytical technique chosen for this study, see Appendix 3.

There are clear hints from the epiphyseal fusion, tooth wear, and probate data that change occurred in Chesapeake husbandry sometime during the last quarter of the seventeenth century (see Fig. 2.5 and 2.6). Such changes in slaughter ages are normally viewed by zooarchaeologists in economic terms, meaning when the intended use of livestock changes, so too will the age at which it is slaughtered. However, as Mark Maltby has pointed out, it is equally reasonable to consider that the animals themselves responded to changing environmental and economic conditions, much like wild populations respond today to human encroachment on their habitat.⁴⁶ If one considers the colonial pannage-free ranging herding system, where little or no supplemental food was provided livestock, then it should be reasonable to assume the situation was not much different for colonial livestock. Slaughter ages, therefore, also could reflect in addition to economic changes any significant shift in the environment and food resources.

By the 1660s, slaughter ages for cattle and swine tended to be older than those that were slaughtered during the first half of the seventeenth century. Based on this age data, it is clear that 36

Ages derived from the York County probate records for the periods 1620-1660 (Table 2.2) support the archaeological evidence for cattle, indicating there was a decrease in livestock aged one to three years, but a large increase in cattle aged greater than 4 years. For zooarchaeologists this documentary evidence is comforting news, since the method used to depict long bone fusion data in surviving age groups has long been criticized for biological and taphonomic biases. Unfortunately, probate inventories do not include ages for either swine or sheep, thus a similar assessment is not possible for these species, but the clear resolution in ages demonstrates the simple but statistically clumsy method, which is used as either survivor or decedent curves by Chaplin, Zeder, and Redding, does portray real age groups.⁴⁷

Age data for swine indicate that there was a similar increase in the age of slaughter during the late seventeenth century (Figs. 2.7 and 2.8). Although there is not as clear a match between the long bone and tooth wear data as there is in the cattle long bone and tooth wear data, the swine data base portrays a slaughter pattern of primarily younger individuals during the first half of the seventeenth century and an older population during the late seventeenth century. In terms of the long bone data, the proportion of the younger age groups decreased from 67% to 38% of 37 Figure 2.7. Domestic swine kill-off pattern based on long bone fusion. Figure 2.8 Domestic swine kill-off pattern based on tooth wear. the population, while the proportion of individuals aged greater than three years being slaughtered increased from 37% to 62% of the population. In terms of the tooth wear data, the proportion of younger age groups (0-6 months and 6-12 months) drops from 25% in the early seventeenth century to 10% in the second half of the seventeenth century, while the proportion of individuals aged greater than 30 months increased from 15% to 50% of the population.

Historically it is known that, except for the first half of the seventeenth century, few goats were kept in the Chesapeake. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to distinguish skeletally between sheep and goats, and only in the presence of certain anatomical features on a particular bone can it be identified as one or the other. Thus, as only one bone from this period could be distinguished as goat the decision was made to combine all the caprine (sheep or goat) remains into a single group. While this data does potentially include some goat, there can be little doubt that most, if not all, of the remains are those of sheep.

The archaeological data for the slaughter ages for caprines during the early seventeenth century is extremely small, reflecting the numbers of sheep and goats that were kept by planters (Fig. 2.9). Consequently, nothing can be said for this period. However, for the second half of the seventeenth century, there is one strong slaughter pattern that was obtained from long bone fusion data, which indicates 44% of the population was killed at greater than 3½ years.

For the late seventeenth century, these long bone data suggest meat was an important product, despite the fact that most early references refer to the usefulness of sheep for primarily 38 Figure 2.9. Domestic caprine kill-off pattern based on long bone fusion. wool production. Robert Beverley provides some documentary support for the interpretation that sheep were raised for meat as well as wool, when he remarked in 1705 that since sheep fleeces were often torn from their backs by briars and bushes, planters often sheared their wool to cool them rather than collect their wool.⁴⁸ According to zooarchaeologist Sebastian Payne, the developer of one of the most sophisticated aging techniques available and a specialist on caprines, when sheep are raised in non-specialized circumstances primarily for their meat, kill-off patterns show that the greatest proportion is slaughtered after the animal has matured, during the second and third year of life. But if wool is the primary objective, then the kill-off pattern should show only small numbers from the second year until the sixth year, when the wool quality tends to drop off, when sheep are slaughtered at a rate of approximately 10% each year.⁴⁹

From an economic perspective, developments in animal husbandry during the seventeenth century Chesapeake occurred within the plantation economy, where the commercial production of tobacco was combined with corn production. To grow tobacco for sale and corn for settlers and livestock to eat, colonists felled forests to create fields. But within a few years, the intense production of tobacco and corn had worn out the soil. It is well documented that when the production of corn and tobacco had depleted the soils, planters shifted to growing wheat and raising sheep. Zooarchaeological evidence, however, indicates herding played an additional role in degrading the landscape.

As herds of cattle, swine, goats, sheep, and horses grew and flourished, by the late seventeenth century herds had stocked the woodlands, fields, and pastures. Livestock ecology and management studies show that these developments had to have impacted the feeding areas.⁵⁰ Light grazing probably increased the productivity of wild pastures, but as the animals fed, they reduced available resources both in quantity and quality. Through grazing livestock change the habitat not only for themselves, but in extreme cases also alter future animal/habitat relations. Given the specific environment, grazing by too many animals, or too heavy use by a few animals, results in overuse, loss of vigor, and ultimately the disappearance of desirable plants. If deterioration proceeds even the soil will become unstable. In specific areas where livestock 39 Figure 2.10. Heady and Child's chart showing relationship between foraging and numbers of livestock. frequented, excessive trampling might have reduced the size of soil aggregates and plant litter to the point that the soil deteriorated and the rains hastened the erosion of once-productive soil. The extent to which fields, where increasing numbers of livestock fed on harvest stubble, and forests, where livestock fed on new growth, were degraded by this behavior is not known.

In the animals themselves, excessive foraging results in reduced growth rate, weight gain, fertility, and overall health. Animals must feed for a longer period of time, but they gain less and eventually lose weight. This relationship between forage and numbers of livestock is expressed in Figure 2.10, which has been taken from Heady and Child.⁵¹ On the left, it shows a low-stocking rate, where few animals graze abundant forage. There, individual animals reach their biological potential, meaning they gain weight rapidly, increase in size, and reproduce easily. The point in the middle, where the curve breaks is the optimum level. Slightly to the right is known as the peril point, where the number of animals grazing on the land is high. Here, animals are beginning to lose weight and lose condition. With stocking at even slightly greater rates, forage availability declines and pasture conditions deteriorate. Here animals rapidly lose condition.

When two or more species of domestic animals graze together, the result can be advantageous, but historically mixed species grazing has resulted in severe overgrazing. The extent to which overgrazing in the Chesapeake was a problem remains a future research topic; at present the archaeological data simply suggests that these principles were in effect. Possibly the age data might be measuring the decline of an environment where introduced species initially thrived, but by the second half of the seventeenth century, in areas where tobacco farming had 40 depleted soils and sheep herds had increased significantly, livestock experienced the decline of a once lush environment.

There is evidence in the documents to support the interpretation that over time, as livestock fed upon the woodlands and fields that had endured tobacco and then the introduction of sheep, some level of degradation had occurred. Durand's 1687 description of one plantation reflects on this situation and the probability that cattle, horses, and sheep were likely to have been pastured in fields together. "As to wheat at M. Wormeley's plantations I saw the cows, horses, & sheep grazing on it. It was Christmas-time when I was there, & I told him they would spoil it. The servants replied that they left the cattle there until the fifteenth of March, & unless they had it thinned they would gather only straw."⁵²

Rather, early seventeenth century references tend to extol the size, health, and general fecundity of the livestock, but the late seventeenth century references describe a different situation. Clayton wrote, for example, Cattle "have little or no Grass in winter, so that …(they) are pined and starved, and many that are brought low and weak, when the Spring begins, venture too far into the Swamps after the fresh Grass, where they perish; so that several Persons lose ten, twenty or thirty head of Cattle in a Year."⁵³ Robert Beverley, one of the most eloquent writers, wrote in 1705 that his own countrymen were ill-treating their cattle by not feeding them in winter, "By which means they starve their young cattle, or at least stint their growth, so that they seldom or never grow as large as they would do, if they were well manag'd."⁵⁴ A number wrote of the diminished size of livestock, and the diminished size of horses became enough of a problem in both Maryland and Virginia that laws requiring small horses be gelded in order to not "Lessen and spoil the whole breed and Streyne of all horses…."⁵⁵ These documents support the interpretation that over time, as increasing numbers of livestock fed on available woodlands and pastures, their health and stature declined.

Building a more complete understanding of the parameters of the herding system as it evolved within the Chesapeake, and the impact the relationship between the land and animals had on each other, requires more documentary and archaeological research. More information is needed on species-specific feeding practices, social behavior, econiches, and the impact agricultural shifts from tobacco to wheat production had on the pasturing of cattle, horses, and sheep. As well, more documentary evidence is needed on the fecundity rates for each species of livestock. Alongside more detailed work with documentary sources, future work with archaeological data is needed. Additional evidence on feeding practices of different species and how different econiches were used throughout the entire colonial period can be obtained from phytoliths found on domestic mammal teeth. Additional evidence on the changing sizes of livestock can be found in measurements that have been taken on the archaeological remains of 41 cattle, swine, and caprines. Together with documentary evidence pulled from laws and legal documents, diaries, probate inventories and tax records, this evidence can spell out the ecological interrelationship that exists between livestock, the woodlands herding system, and the land they fed upon.

Husbandry in the eighteenth century built upon the foundations laid by the early colonists, and evident in both historical and archaeological sources is a clear picture that the woodlands-based herding system remained intact, essentially unchanged for the majority of planters. Introduced animals, both feral and tame, had flourished in the Chesapeake, but at the same time, the woodland pastures for these animals had decreased through the growth of human populations and the expansion of the tobacco-focused economy. Woodlands still abounded in the region, but their ability to support large herds in good health had decreased.⁵⁶ In the very early years palisades had created rich pastures as much as forty square miles and herds grew. But within a short period time planters fenced in their crops to protect them from grazing livestock, and by 1642 all persons were required to make fences at least four and a half feet high, and livestock owners were liable for any damage to crops within adequately fenced areas.⁵⁷ Livestock continued to break through these protective barriers as they are want to do, however, and later laws required colonists to make fences five feet high, although some are reported to have built fences as high as seven or eight feet.⁵⁸ The image of rural plantation life with livestock roaming from their owners' property onto their neighbors, where they fed in the wooded and cleared lands, is strong.

As herds increased, so too did the damage to the plant community, and during the first decades of the eighteenth century laws were passed to protect landowners. As frustrating as it was for a landowner, permitting access to livestock owned by neighbors who lacked sufficient land to support their animals was considered a public right, and ever since arriving in the Chesapeake individuals who owned no pasture lands were legally permitted to graze their livestock on the land of others, provided they pay the land owner for whatever crops their livestock destroyed. But as livestock populations increased, it became enough of a problem that in 1713 a law was passed rescinding this right. "Whereas it is found by daily experience, that the great number of horses and mares, kept by persons who have no freehold or tenancy in lands, and suffered to go at large on the lands of other persons, is not only prejudicial to the breed of horses, but also injurious to the stocks of cattle and sheep of this colony …no person whatsoever…not having a freehold of fifty acres of land, or tenement of the value of twenty pounds, or not being a tenant of, and occupying lands or tenements, … shall pay five hundred pounds of tobacco, or fifty shilling in money, yearly, shall keep... any stoned horse, or unspaid mare, or…one gelding, or one spaid mare…"⁵⁹ Clearly, roaming livestock were becoming much more than a nuisance, and individual rights came to prevail over communal grazing, which had been tolerated for a hundred years.

As towns began to emerge in this rural landscape, many residents kept animals, which they allowed to run on the property of nearby planters. As in rural areas, increased numbers of 42 livestock meant increased stress on nearby pastures, and laws such as the one passed in 1714 rescinded the long-held privilege for urban residents. "Whereas the Inhabitants of the Town of Delaware, at West Point…, do keep great Numbers of Cattle, Horses, Sheep, and Hogs which feed and root upon the adjacent Lands and Marshes belonging to William West, Gentleman, depriving him of many advantages he might otherwise make of his pasturage in supporting greater stocks of his own, for relieving him therein, Be it enacted…That from and after … no House keeper residing in said Town, without the Consent of the said William West or other Owner of the said adjacent Lands, shall keep in the said Town above Two Cows and Two Horses…."⁶⁰

The dependency of urban dwellers on rural produce began at a very early phase in urban development. Within the continuity of the open woodlands pasture system, planters responded to the decline of the tobacco production by focusing their efforts on growing wheat and producing agricultural produce for the newly emerging urban markets. Livestock were among those products; hence planters who intended to raise livestock for profit adopted new techniques aimed at producing livestock for sale, rather than the old subsistence-oriented methods they had grown up with.

The British, including Arthur Young, Robert Bakewell and others, have long been thought as the developers of progressive, commercially-focused husbandry. But, for as long as markets and cities have been around in Britain and indeed in ancient civilizations, commercially-focused husbandry has been practiced.⁶¹ In order to identify what techniques colonial planters used to produce livestock for market, English agricultural history texts were consulted for traditional commercially-focused husbandry methods, then the historical data base on Chesapeake animal husbandry was thoroughly combed to identify which of these techniques were used in the New World.

In Britain throughout the eighteenth century, pigs remained the mainstay of subsistence farming. As Trow-Smith expressed it, "Compared to improvements in breeds and techniques of feeding cattle and sheep which were made in the course of the eighteenth century, the husbandry of the pig remained backward in the extreme. Pigs were the last species of farm animal to receive the attention of the improver or skillful commercial breeder and feeder, because its end-products of pork and bacon were still mainly the home-grown comestibles of countryman."⁶²

Subsistence-oriented husbandry utilized the woods by day, and sometimes penning in an enclosure by night.⁶³ From as early as Saxon times, pigs were kept in yards and in stys, where they were bred and overwintered with waste and legume crops. Fattening pigs for slaughter was done when the pigs were any age, although if they were meant to be either baconers or porkers, they were slaughtered when they were "rising to two years," a time when pigs take on weight rapidly. How pigs were fattened varied according to the specific environment. With woodland herds, pigs were fattened on peas, beans, whey, and buttermilk. They were slaughtered when they were in 43 their first year, or about nine months, since the weight was sufficient for a family and any additional substantial flesh gain occurred later at 18-24 months.⁶⁴

Commercial pig husbandry brought the increased use of stys.⁶⁵ Since pigs are efficient consumers of the by-products of cheese making, skim milk, buttermilk, and whey, there was a close association with dairying, and commonly dairymen kept pigs to consume the milk residue left from their operation.⁶⁶ Since pigs also are efficient consumers of the by-products of distilling-barley and grains which were used for malting-distillers also kept swine on a large scale. As commercial production got underway, pigs were kept until their second year approached. Since fattening immature pigs was inefficient, farmers took store pigs (those kept for fattening) in lean condition and finished them on pulses and cereal meats. By the end of the eighteenth century, progressive farmers had begun to fatten with potatoes and turnips. Invariably, the potatoes were boiled or steamed and fed with meal to both store and fattening stock.⁶⁷

In the Chesapeake, in Beverley's words, "hogs run where they list, and find their own support in the woods, without any care of the owner."⁶⁸ Native resources found in the woodlands and marshes were prime food sources, although colonists intentionally allowed pigs to graze on field stubble after harvest.⁶⁹ In 1744 Joseph Ball instructed his nephew, "The pasture fence must be at all times kept up Strong, close, & high, as a right Good Cornfield Fence; so that neither Horse, nor Hog, can get in or out, but as they are let in, or out…I would have the hogs kept in the Pasture in Peach time, so that they may go in and out of the Peach orchard, and no other People's hogs get in. At other times, I would have them kept out of the Pasture…."⁷⁰ Fattening before slaughter seems to have been accomplished with the staple Indian corn and fodder.

From reading through the historical references on swine husbandry, it is difficult at this time to pinpoint exactly when planters began to use more aggressive fattening techniques. Descriptions by Landon Carter, John Clayton, Hugh Jones, and others are what has survived-indications are scattered, and methods that would fatten swine more quickly could well have been instituted before the historical account. However, it is clear that by the second half of the eighteenth century planters such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both read the British promoter of progressive husbandry Arthur Young, adopted potatoes, hominy, and meal to make them an integral element in swine husbandry.⁷¹

Archaeological age data, which is a sensitive monitor of slaughter ages, may well be a more accurate indicator of when commercial production began. This is particularly so, since virtually every rural faunal assemblage represents the household consumption of a wealthier planter, a person who was more likely to engage in commercial husbandry, at least more so than tenants or other poor households who were more likely to raise swine primarily for their own household's consumption. By comparing the rural slaughter ages from the different time periods, and then comparing these ages with those found in urban assemblages from the same time periods, it should be possible to monitor the swine husbandry of wealthy planter, and determine when a more concerted effort at producing swine for market purposes began, and the extent to which these animals were sold in town.

Further, since historians and zooarchaeologists specializing in British agriculture have clearly distinguished the first-year population as being the target slaughter age for subsistence farming, and the 18-24 month population as being the target slaughter age for pigs intended for sale, identifying the changing proportions of these age groups should help to distinguish when pig husbandry changed in response to emerging markets.

Beginning with the long bone data, there is a strong presence of the youngest age group throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century assemblages, but a decrease over time, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century. The early seventeenth century data shows almost half the population was less than a year when slaughtered, then in each subsequent time period, (1660-1700, 1700-1750, 1750-1775, and 1775-1800), the youngest age group fluctuates between 19% and 28% (see Figs. 2.11 and 2.12). The 12-24 month age group, on the other hand (which encompasses the commercial target age of 18-24 months), shows an increase over time, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century, this age group ranges from 11% to 17% of the total population. Then, in the third and fourth quarters of the eighteenth century, it jumps to 31% and 38% of the population.

Comparing the proportion of ages in the rural and urban assemblages dating to the first half of the eighteenth century shows there is a very close similarity, a signal to zooarchaeologists, who interpret the similarity as being indicative of a largely unspecialized economy. What is striking, however, is what happens in the age data for the second half of the eighteenth century. Proportionately more of the youngest age group remained at home on the plantation, while proportionately more of the 12-24 month age group went to market. This evidence is significant because it points to two issues; it identifies when rural planters had begun to alter their husbandry in response to commercial markets, and it points to when urban consumers became increasingly dependent upon commercially produced goods, rather than those they might have produced themselves or obtained from friends and relatives living in the nearby countryside.

The archaeological tooth wear data, which is thought by zooarchaeologists to be the more accurate, does not support the long bone data as closely as the two sets of data do for the cattle and caprine remains. These data show, on the whole, a much younger population, and the older age groups are almost absent. If the cattle and caprine tooth wear data behaved similarly, one could support the standard interpretation that zooarchaeologists should rely upon tooth wear and dismiss the long bone data as being too problematical. However, given the extremely close correlation between the cattle long bone, tooth wear, and 45 Figure 2.11. Domestic swine kill-off patterns based on long bone fusion. Figure 2.12. Domestic swine kill-off patterns based on tooth wear. probate inventory data, such a dismissal should not be made. Additional analyses of these data are needed, but for now one theory explaining the discrepancy between the swine long bone and tooth wear data is under consideration. Following the zooarchaeological assumption that tooth wear captures all age groups, and it should therefore be the more reliable, one must ask the question, "Where are the mandibles of the older population?" It appears that the distribution of pig heads followed separate rules. Perhaps pig heads had become enough of a delicacy that wealthy planters kept the younger ones for themselves, and served them as elegant dishes to themselves and their guests. In kitchen refuse related to George Washington's household, for example, a large number of young pig mandibles was carefully butchered axially and longitudinally, leaving no doubt that they represent intentional cuts of meat. Heads from the older individuals may have gone to their slaves. Future analyses of faunal assemblages associated with slaves and poorer white households may some day help to verify this theory.

Nonetheless, a careful consideration of the tooth wear evidence shows that a large proportion of the population was slaughtered between 12 and 24 months, and that over time an increasing number of individuals this age group were slaughtered. In town, the proportion of 12-24 month old individuals consumed grew from 27% in the first half of the century to over 40% of the population in the second half of the eighteenth century. In this sense, there is a strong agreement between the long bone and tooth wear data, and they both point to 1750 as a time when planters began to fatten pigs specifically for market.

Documentary sources confirm this interpretation. In particular laws passed restricting livestock movements help pinpoint when urban residents began to depend upon market foods rather than foods they obtained through their own personal sources. This dependency began as early as 1710, when Williamsburg residents began a campaign to restrict hogs from rooting within the city and in certain adjacent places. Later in 1714 they enacted a law restricting hogs. "…after the first day of March, …no hog, shoat, or pig, which shall be above the age of Two Months, not being Ringed or having the nose thereof Cutt Sufficiently to prevent such Hog, Shoat, or pig from Rooting, Shall be suffered to go at large within the Space of one Mile from the Church now building in the Said City, or within the Limitts of the Ports to the Said City…".⁷² Despite the passing of this laws, pigs still were going at large in the city, for again in 1722 another petition was made.⁷³

Maryland colonists also made moves to restrict hogs, when in 1731 a bill was passed by the lower House prohibiting the raising of hogs in any town in the Province.⁷⁴ In Virginia, however, legislatures chose to restrict livestock movements town by town, and petitions restricting not only hogs, but also cattle, sheep, and horses continued to be made through the 47 1740s. This is very close to the time the zooarchaeological evidence identifies as the period in which planters began to raise hogs for profit.

Cattle

In the British Isles farmers had responded to markets for many hundreds of years, but for the most part they engaged in subsistence agriculture and raised livestock using the husbandry methods they had known for generations. On medieval farms little supplemental feed was provided. Oxen were given hay and then oats in the winter, calves were given a little barley or oats, and cows received only hay and straw. When bullocks were fattened, they were mostly fed straw and hay, and stall-feeding, which was expensive, was rare among these farmers.⁷⁵ Those farmers who did raise livestock for sale used fattening techniques to hasten the growth of their livestock. Biddick demonstrates in a study of manoral husbandry that monasteries having differing types of land each kept cattle during different phases of their development, then when they had matured to a good slaughter weight sent them to market. During the first half of the eighteenth century, when progressive agrarian writers had begun to promote the use of highly specialized foods such as turnips, many areas still continued to rely upon old methods.⁷⁶ In the highlands of Scotland, cattle continued to graze on hilly unimproved pastures most of the winter, they were fed little supplemental feed, and consequently they tended to be very small. Here in this environment cattle reached a marketable age usually in the autumn of their fourth or fifth year of life.⁷⁷

In the lowlands where pasturage was rich, however, different techniques were used. During the winter months cattle were fattened by way of yard or stall-feeding with peas and oats, hay, cabbage and turnips.⁷⁸ Here heifers reached maturity at 3 years of age, while steers, who matured more slowly, were ready to finish at 4-5 years.

As markets developed between 1700 and 1750, British farmers responded to the demand for meat by bringing into use the new fodder crops being promoted by the agrarian pioneers, but using them within the parameters of their traditional form of husbandry. "All in all, the early eighteenth century practices may be seen as extensions of the mediaeval and post-mediaeval husbandry methods, made to meet the needs of the great mouth [urban consumer]…. Only here and there were men to be seen digging the first trial trenches for the foundations of the great superstructure of the new stock and the stockmanship."⁷⁹ As Trow-Smith advises, identifying the commercially-focused husbandry of this period is not so much in identifying fundamental shifts in herding methods, as it is in identifying the use of these new fodder and pasturage crops.

The turnip and cabbage began to replace the bare fallow obtained in mixed husbandry, while clovers, lucerne, and sainfoin were brought in to enrich pastures. Techniques used to add fat to fully grown and lean frames of mature animals varied. One method was for cattle breeders to gauge the quality of grass on their land. If it was in poor condition, they might sell off store beef cheap, but if pastures were lush and hay was plentiful, they would fatten the store cattle 48 themselves, then sell them at market for high prices.⁸⁰ Working between these two extremes, graziers used pastures, grain they could not sell, hay, cereals, pulses, and the new fodder crops of the seventeenth century, turnips and cabbages. The imported concentrated foods such as oilcakes, and carrots and potatoes, which were the result of the progressive writers of the eighteenth century, were not used until the second half of the century, when the more progressive farmers introduced these into their husbandry and they began to alter the physical environments of their farms.

Cattle husbandry in the Chesapeake remained firmly rooted in the open woodlands pasture system throughout the eighteenth century. From the early seventeenth century constraints were placed on cattle. At the beginning tight constraints were in large part due to the need to defend them from Native Americans, which they did by keeping them enclosed at night and in herds that were watched by keepers.⁸¹ After these early years, constraints loosened, but penning was retained as an integral element of their herding system. References describe this element of herding in the wealthy planter's husbandry of the late seventeenth century. "After they clear'd a fresh piece of Ground out of the Woods, it will not bear Tobacco past two or three Years, unless Cow-pened; for they manure their Ground by keeping their Cattle, as in the South you do your Sheep, every night confining them within Hurdles, which they have removed when they have sufficiently dung'd one spot of Ground…."⁸² Since manure imparted a bad taste to tobacco, it has been presumed that planters avoided this ancient method of fertilizing soils. However, the increased numbers of references to pens for cattle and sheep, cowyards, and pig stys and their close association with manuring during the eighteenth century indicates confining livestock remained an integral and strong element of plantation agriculture, possibly for fertilizing tobacco but maybe more frequently for fertilizing corn and wheat fields .⁸³

In the eighteenth century planters followed a path that was similar in many ways to the path followed by British farmers. Immersed in their own traditions of allowing cattle, probably steers and dry cows, to feed in woodland pasturage, and keeping cows on fields alongside the growing numbers of sheep, they managed their free ranging stock. Thomas Anburey, a Lieutenant in the Army of General Burgoyne, left valuable accounts of this form of husbandry, since he observed husbandry as it was practiced by the less privileged planters and tenant farmers. According to this visitor, even in the 1780s cattle husbandry remained firmly rooted in the past, cattle were fed little supplemental feed, and their growth remained stunted.⁸⁴ Another statement 49 by visitor John Smyth exhibits a firm European bias, but it provides useful clues on how livestock were generally cared for. "…very great numbers of black cattle, horses, and hogs actually … run at large, entirely wild, without any other proprietors than those of the ground they happen to be found upon. In some parts, each person, in possession of a plantation, has what is called a right in the woods; by which he is entitled to the property of a certain proportion of the livestock that runs wild, such as I just described…."⁸⁵ There can be no doubt that livestock herding remained firmly rooted in the woodland pasture system.

How extensive these woodland pastures were at any time during the colonial period remains uncertain. One late-seventeenth century traveler, Dauphine de Durand remarked that farmers generally kept the proportions of their lands at about half in woodland, a fourth as pastures, and the other quarter under cultivation, but further research is needed to determine how different farmers and planters developed their field systems at different times and in different regions.⁸⁶ What is clear is that woodlands remained an integral part of the pasture system throughout the colonial period. So too was penning. A traditional element in English husbandry that was originally incorporated into the Chesapeake herding system, it remained an integral part throughout the colonial period, but determining the extent to which different farmers and planters incorporated penning into cattle, sheep, and pig husbandry needs further work.

Even as wealthy planters began to raise livestock for sale, they did so within the framework of this woodland pasture system. George Washington, who corresponded with agriculturalist Arthur Young and wrote copiously on his plantation activities at the end of the eighteenth century, gives us a balanced view of woodland husbandry. Woodlands were considered pastures. In 1787 he wrote, "…No more cattle is raised than can be supported by lowland meadows, swamps, & c., and the tops and blades of Indian corn; as very few persons have attended to sowing grasses, and connecting cattle with their crops…."⁸⁷ In another passage he tells us this pasture system was widespread, and that in its unimproved form still existed throughout the middle and upper parts of the country, where cattle were raised cheaply on the "spontaneous food of forests." In the eastern portion of the Chesapeake, which had been cultivated long enough that forests were depleted, here the farmers probably managed their woodland pastures, but they still did not pen large numbers of cattle and sheep as a means of recovering manure for their fields.⁸⁸

Woodland pastures remained an integral element in even the wealthy planters herding system. Washington himself refers in 1799 to how he incorporated this traditional element into his 50 progressive herding system, when he reported that the common, or woodland pasture, was to be enclosed with a post and rail fence running from the slave quarters to the river in a manner where the stock would have free and uninterrupted passage from the barn yard to the woodland pasture.⁸⁹

The current understanding obtained from this research is that woodland pasturage and penning co-existed, but as planters began to raise livestock for sale, they developed fattening techniques using the traditional husbandry methods. Penning probably became the focus for keeping dairy cows, sheep, and beef cattle, while woodland pastures remained the focus of dry cows, yearlings, steers, and pigs. With additional research with plantation records and other sources, the inter-relationship that existed between penning, fields, and woodland pasture systems for both subsistence and commercial husbandry should become clear.

Documentation makes it clear that from as early as the 1730s wealthy planters managed their pastures. Fences and ditches were built to keep livestock out of fields and orchards, but it also controlled when livestock could profitably be kept in to graze on wheat and corn stubble after harvest, and to keep orchards in manageable condition. Joseph Ball affirms this technique when he requested that the calves and yearlings, along with horses, be given the free liberty to go in at all times into the peach orchard, where they would keep the broom grass which would kill the trees down.⁹⁰

The use of Indian corn for supplemental feed and the use of blades and tops as fodder was widespread and probably the manner in which most farmers fed their livestock. Beginning in the 1690s, corn tops and blades began to be valued in York County, Virginia probate inventories, and indication of their more systematic preservation and use. But as early as 1724 Hugh Jones reported that some planters had introduced good clover and oats, and some even planted the imported perennial herb sainfoin. Later in 1744 Joseph Ball had begun to sow worn out tobacco soil with rye to let it revert back to a cowpen.⁹¹ In the 1760s, references to introduced feed and grasses increase, indicating more were beginning to experiment with different methods, including feeding meal and hominy, and planting burnet and lucerne in pastures. By the 1770s references indicate new feeds included potatoes and turnips, which Landon Carter tells us he used as winter's food for "the cattle that gives milk".⁹²

Wealthy planters also recognized the effect too many livestock had on their pastures. To prevent them being overgrazed, Joseph Ball gave specific instructions of how many cattle, hogs, horses, and sheep should be kept on any one of his plantations. Writing to his nephew, he instructed him, "You must not keep too many cows, nor sows: and when there are too many calves, or Pigs, you must kill some and Eat them, and you must kill the Cow calves, if they be out 51 of proportion. The best way to have a Good Stock, is not to have too many breeders and steers are more easily kept than Cows: & will sell better…."⁹³

Much of this effort was driven by commercial goals, and as planters responded to markets they began to shift from a subsistence-oriented form of husbandry, where livestock were allowed to fatten as they matured. As in Britain the Chesapeake planters kept an eye on profit, and husbandry techniques aimed to produce livestock more profitably for market were introduced. Penned cattle gained weight faster and their dung that accumulated in the pens could be used as fertilizer.⁹⁴ Stalls also were built as a relatively new way to fatten cattle. In 1757 Landon Carter described his new additions. The pens were 40 square yards and held 60 cattle, where dung could be collected, and the new roofed cow stalls kept the cattle and their feed dry and warm. Built to hold 30 head of cattle, the stall was roofed, raised a foot above the yard, and contained a crib where cattle could feed themselves. Here, Carter kept yearlings which he fed wheat chaff and hay, and cows which were about to give birth. These calves were allowed to remain with their mother while nursing, so that they would grow strong and healthy.⁹⁵

The archaeological age data supports the interpretation that cattle husbandry remained firmly rooted in its woodland-based husbandry system throughout the eighteenth century (see Figs. 2.13 and 2.14). Comparing the rural seventeenth and eighteenth century assemblages, the oldest age group composed of all cattle older than 48 months remained the dominant group for two hundred years, with the troublesome exception of the assemblages dating to the first half of the eighteenth century, which contains far greater numbers of individuals aged 24-36 months than any other period. Zooarchaeologists point to differential preservation, particularly dog chewing, as the most likely explanation for biases in the long bone data base. The tooth wear evidence, which is claimed to be the more accurate, however, does not refute the long bone data; in fact it supports ages found in the long bone data. A fuller discussion of the fine points in this problem can be found in Appendix 3. For now it appears the apparent problem might be explained in terms of variability in cattle husbandry on either a regional or individual level, but sorting the technical from husbandry-related issues requires further study. For now, the long bone data, which is supported by the tooth wear data, shows that as the eighteenth century progressed, the slaughter population in general was younger, and included larger proportions of individuals aged between 24-48 months. This fact leaves little doubt that the increasingly specialized form of cattle husbandry being adopted by the wealthy plantation owners produced cattle who matured to a slaughter weight at less than approximately four years of age.

Comparing the rural and urban assemblages, it becomes immediately apparent that from the early eighteenth century on, urban dwellers consumed proportionately greater numbers of the very young aged less than 12 months than their rural counterparts. It also is apparent that urban dwellers tended to consume younger beef, as seen in the oldest age group. During the last half of the century, this group is proportionately smaller in the urban assemblages than in the rural, and in their place are greater numbers of the middle age groups, those aged between 24-48 months.

Figure 2.13. Domestic cattle kill-off patterns based on long bone fusion.

Figure 2.14. Domestic cattle kill-off patterns based on tooth wear.

It has been suggested that cattle raised in either the Carolinas or the western part of Virginia may well have been marketed in Williamsburg. This indeed may be the case, but considering the similarities that exist between the urban and rural assemblages from the same periods (1700-1740, 1750-1775, and 1775-1800), it seems unlikely that imported cattle played a great role in provisioning Williamsburg residents. In summary, then, it appears that the specialized fattening methods introduced first during the second quarter, then increasingly during the third and fourth quarters of the eighteenth century, reduced the amount of time needed to fatten cattle, and that many of these individuals were bound for market.

While the tooth wear data is statistically very weak, they provide a greater resolution in the slaughter ages. Comparing the rural and urban data, they show that veal was marketed in town

Further evidence of the fattening of cattle for market is found in both the York County and Anne Arundel County probate inventory records. As can be seen in the changing proportions of age groups, as the eighteenth century progressed herds were composed of fewer and fewer individuals aged greater than 48 months, while younger individuals became increasingly dominant. Since the assemblages discussed are from sites located in and around Tidewater Virginia, the age groups recorded in York County here may in fact be a better comparison than those from Anne Arundel County. On the basis of this historical evidence, it would seem that commercial production began in earnest after 1750, and increased in intensity after 1775.

In assessing the probate data, it is important to understand that in some cases exact ages were recorded, but in many cases only general ages were written down. Thus, two figures have been used, one that gives the proportions of known ages, and another that gives the general categories of "Young" and "Old." When each data set is viewed in its own terms, it becomes clear that they show the same progression. The general grouping identifies the decreasing proportions of older individuals, while the exact ages targets commercially-produced livestock to be in the 12-36 month middle age groups, the same age group identified by the long bone data. Further research with documentary sources, more detailed analyses of both archaeological age data and probate inventories may help to refine this evidence.

Sheep

The introduction of increasing numbers of sheep in the Chesapeake during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries marks an important ecological shift that was similar to the one Europe experienced from Neolithic times into the Roman occupation.⁹⁶ As forests were felled and fields created out of the woodlands, the keep for browsing cattle and pannaging swine was correspondingly reduced, opening the way for short herbaceous plants that flourished in the cleared environment to become established. Sheep thrived in this evolving landscape, and populations flourished as they spread over the open faces of the countryside.⁹⁷ In Britain where forests were cleared sheep grew in importance, but where woodlands were maintained herding remained strong.

Throughout the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, swine, cattle, horses, and (to a small extent) goats fed with relative freedom in the woodlands, clearing the way for sheep. By 1688, John Clayton remarked that most wealthy planters had begun to keep flocks of sheep, "so that a piece of mutton is a finer treat than wither venison, wild goose, or duck."⁹⁸ Records are clear that while the wealthy tended to keep the larger flocks, the poorer did maintain some, and the care given them apparently was what they did for their cattle. In 1762, John Wiley wrote what was 55 probably a biased view: "...there is no dumb Creature taken so little Notice of in Virginia as they; there being but very few People here that take Care to sow any Thing for Winter Pasturage for them, or provide or give them any other food than a few dry Blades in the Winter."⁹⁹ Landon Carter, a wealthy planter, in 1770 described the plight of less-well-off planters during times of bad weather: "…his Creatures without food very little grass and too weak to range the wet woods for the buds of trees. I have been obliged to give over feeding with Corn…a little to the poor suckling Ewes …".¹⁰⁰

As the wealthy planters shifted their focus to raising sheep, so too came a shift from open woodlands husbandry to the mixed species usage of pastures and enclosed fields. Specifically how planters managed sheep within this system is more difficult to discern since most of the documents examined record primarily lambing rates and deaths. But those that do exist indicate that they fed them, like they did cattle, hogs, and horses, Indian corn, and blades and tops as fodder, but unlike their poorer neighbors they created pens, as seen in the 1711 reference by William Byrd, who referred to a sheep-pen and associated them with the care of his cattle, "We moved the sheep-pen with the ox down the walk by the river."¹⁰¹

Several planters referred to cows, sheep, and horses grazing alongside each other in their diaries and written accounts of their farming activities.¹⁰² Lord Adam Gordon, for example, wrote in 1765 of Virginia, "…their pastures afford them excellent Beef and Mutton, and their Woods are Stocked with Venison, Game, and Hogs…."¹⁰³ Landon Carter also probably practiced mixed species grazing on pastures, for he wrote in 1770, "…I have seen every patch but the meadow…But nothing grows and creatures are yet poor. The lambs not filled, the Ewes very spindly, and the Cows with young calves [are pitifully] thin."¹⁰⁴

By the end of century, George Washington wrote specifically on the close herding relationship that existed between wheat agriculture and sheep and cattle. "Arable land can yield wheat only by means of Cattle and sheep. It is not dung that is wanted so much, as a change of products, and repose under grass, which is the soul of management; all cleaning and tillage to be given in the year that yields green winter food. In such a system you may produce by means of 40 oxen and 500 sheep, 5000 bushls. of wheat; and if you raise oxen to 60 and the Sheep to 600, you may have so much more wheat. It is only by increasing Cattle that you can increase wheat 56 permanently…."¹⁰⁵ Wheat production depended upon cattle and sheep, who grazed upon stubble fields, leaving their manure to enrich the soil. The agricultural benefit is clear.

The wealthier that left records, however, show that by the early eighteenth century some were raised on clover and fed oats, while others were allowed into peach orchards along with hogs, although Joseph Ball remarked in 1744 that they did more harm than the other animals.¹⁰⁶ By the 1760s and 1770s planters were consciously incorporating specialized husbandry methods into raising sheep, just as they were doing for their cattle. Landon Carter provided lambs, along with yearling cattle, a house and large yard for them to lie in, and fed them hominy beat fine, fodder, and corn.¹⁰⁷ Some were also kept in stalls, along with milch cows, oxen, and beeves.¹⁰⁸ Records indicate they, like cattle, were fed food, such as turnips, pea vines, and buck wheat that were recommended by progressive agriculturalists such as Arthur Young.¹⁰⁹ Thomas Jefferson, for example, sowed turnips on the wheat stubble, then folded his sheep on the field.¹¹⁰

Although evidence is thin, some of these references to sheep and cattle being pastured together specify cows, a provocative clue that opens the door to understanding the complexities of plantation husbandry. Quite possibly, cattle tended to be allowed to graze in the woodlands, while cows, who may have been with calf, were more likely to be kept closer to home where they could be milked more easily.

Archaeological age data from the rural and urban eighteenth century assemblages provide a useful measure of the changes that occurred in sheep husbandry (see Figs. 2.15 and 2.16). The long bone data demonstrates that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sheep were raised for their meat, since these slaughter profiles show a predominance of individuals that were killed during their second and third year. However, they show as the century progressed the older individuals increase dramatically in the rural assemblages, indicating sheep were increasingly were being raised for their wool. Meat had become a secondary product.

Comparing the urban assemblages to the rural of the same time period, it becomes apparent that the urban assemblages mirror the rural assemblages, but contain at any given period more younger individuals than the rural assemblages, and the rural assemblages contain proportionately more older individuals. This is particularly true for the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a sign that the urban market for sheep had increased.

Comparing this evidence with the tooth wear data, there are in any given time period a greater proportion of the youngest age group, but by looking at them in their own terms, and 57 Figure 2.15. Domestic caprine kill-off patterns based on long bone fusion. Figure 2.16. Domestic caprine kill-off patterns based on tooth wear. 58

Probate inventory data from Anne Arundel County unfortunately did not record the specific ages of sheep. General categories of young and old, however, were recorded, and they can give a general indication of the trend in herd populations. These data, in fact, support the archaeological evidence, suggesting that beginning at mid-century, sheep herds increased in age.

The combined historical and archaeological evidence demonstrate the close relationship that existed between the herding environment, which evolved to support the sheep herds. Through livestock continually feeding in the woodlands, colonists felling forests, and in their place creating a landscape of fields, pastures, and orchards, the world in which livestock lived slowly changed. With tobacco farming depleting the soils, and tobacco prices falling in Europe, planters shifted their commercial energies into their animals, which originally had been raised for subsistence purposes. As planters shifted their business interests to cattle, hogs, and sheep, they moved consciously to alter the herding system to a commercial base. The changes went hand-in-hand with the growing urban markets in the Chesapeake.

This study of archaeological slaughter patterns and animal husbandry has demonstrated that patterns present in the archaeological record reflect broad economic trends in the regional market system. Urban households that live in urban communities, therefore, are enmeshed in economic trade systems and personal choice is limited by the availability of foods.

The closeness that existed between the regional agricultural system and the urban market is reminiscent of such systems that exist in the modern Third World, where food staples such as meats, grains, and vegetables are produced locally.¹¹¹ In these unspecialized markets, residents often maintain some relationship with rural producers. Some urban dwellers own nearby farms, some depend upon kin or friends to provide them with food, and others purchase meat from 59 farmers at the local marketplace. The age data that shows such a close similarity, particularly during the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates that this was true of Williamsburg.

Studies of these Third World markets have shown that, as urban centers grow and become more commercially-based, personal relationships give way to impersonal business relationships, and the flow of rural produce into town increases. Farmers respond to this new opportunity by intensifying subsistence-oriented forms of husbandry.

Zooarchaeologists have demonstrated how the process of urbanization affects animal husbandry.¹¹² In small-scale systems, farmers raise a variety of livestock to produce meat and other products primarily for their own consumption, although they also produce small surpluses that they sell to urban consumers. The ages of animals found in urban assemblages, therefore, resemble those found in rural sites. But in large-scale economies, specialized husbandry methods to raise younger animals specifically for sale are adopted. Through the comparison of rural and urban assemblages, age profiles from rural assemblages should differ from age profiles from urban assemblages, and the slaughter patterns should show evidence of specialized forms of animal husbandry.

Age data derived from the many rural and urban sites located in and around Williamsburg monitor the growth of commercialized animal husbandry in the Chesapeake. In general, the closeness between the early eighteenth century rural and urban age profiles show that during the first half of the eighteenth century, Williamsburg and its residents remained intimately tied to their rural surroundings. Some commercial activity is evident in the greater proportions of young veal, younger mutton, lamb, and younger beef that found their way into urban kitchens and into urban trash heaps, but the striking similarity indicates that a measurable degree of dependence on market foods came only after 1750, then grew increasingly thereafter.

D. IMPACT OF TOWNS ON RURAL MARKET ORIENTATION AND SPECIALIZATION

Our project has clearly demonstrated that nearby planters responded positively and creatively to the markets offered by even very small urban populations. The populations of the towns of Williamsburg and Annapolis, the urban places on which we have concentrated our study, were never large by any standard. In the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, the proportion of the Chesapeake populations living in towns seems to have remained relatively constant. In Maryland, for example, Annapolitans constituted 6% of the people of surrounding Anne Arundel County in 1704, 7% in 1755, and still only 6% in 1782-83.¹¹³ In Virginia, colonial urban 60 populations were similarly small, and it is likely that their proportion of total local populations also remained relatively constant. After the Revolution in older tidewater counties the percentage of town dwellers rose, not because these towns were growing, but because surrounding rural areas were declining in population. For example in 1790 Williamsburg and Yorktown residents were 18% of the total population of the two counties (York and James City) surrounding the towns.¹¹⁴ In the third quarter of the century, only the port of Norfolk surpassed Williamsburg in population, and its total size prior to the Revolution has probably been exaggerated.¹¹⁵ The size of the resident town populations, however, to some extent minimizes the full scope of these urban markets. During meetings of colonial legislatures and provincial courts, the temporary populations of the capital towns swelled considerably, offering briefly expanded marketing opportunities for rural suppliers able to respond to increased short term demands. Similarly, marketing opportunities in the port towns included the periodic provisioning of large numbers of ships engaged in the tobacco, grain, and West Indian trades, as well as supplying the more predictable needs of permanent town dwellers. Inland towns such as Winchester, Virginia, and Frederick, Maryland, also served as regional provisioning markets for streams of migrants passing through to the south and west, and, especially during the French and Indian War, as centers of distribution for colonial and imperial armies.

After the American Revolution, the pull of town markets increased dramatically, if unevenly. Many of Virginia's towns were severely and adversely affected by the British naval blockade of the Chesapeake throughout most of the conflict; more isolated Baltimore prospered, but Norfolk burned, and Yorktown never recovered from the devastation inflicted by occupying forces. Annapolis, which continued after the war as the Maryland state capital, gained population up to 1800; then its size stabilized up to 1830 at around 2,200. Once Virginia's capital moved to Richmond in 1780, Williamsburg became no more than a sleepy, inconsequential county seat. Between 1790 and 1830 Williamsburg's population fluctuated between 1,200 and 1,400, its size in 1782. But elsewhere in the state, Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Norfolk, Petersburg, Portsmouth, and Winchester grew into towns of a size similar to or surpassing Williamsburg. And at the same time a number of other, smaller Virginia towns also reached populations of between 300 and 600, enough, our study suggests, to have had a demonstrable impact on farmers living in their immediate hinterlands.¹¹⁶

During and after the Revolution, Baltimore developed as the region's first true city, reaching a population of over 13,000 by 1790. The Baltimore market, not surprisingly, markedly affected the management strategies of planters and farmers living within the immediate marketing area. In addition, the pull of this market was so strong that large planters living as far away as the relatively isolated lower Eastern shore of Maryland and Virginia, as well as in the Maryland and Virginia Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley, occasionally opted to send crops, the District of Columbia was established, similar local dynamics of demand and supply began to produce, and 61

The extent of planters' responses to these emerging markets has been minimized in the historical literature because, in part, some of the effects of these markets cannot readily be distinguished from the effects of rising inter-colonial and trans-Atlantic demands for basic foodstuffs. In the second three quarters of the eighteenth century, towns were just one of several growing markets for wheat, corn, and, to a lesser extent, livestock, to which planters responded. General management strategies and mix of major cash crops were similar on plantations like Carter's Grove, that was producing everything but tobacco primarily for town markets, and other large plantations distant from and uninvolved with urban provisioning. Europe, the West Indies, and the northern colonies constituted much larger markets that, given trade networks centered on Britain, were as easy or easier to reach than many urban markets inside the region.

The differential impact of urban demands for grain and livestock becomes clear from comparison of Table 2.7, which shows Williamsburg's estimated requirements for meat and grain in 1775, when its population was at its height for this period, with Table 2.8 which records the quantities of foodstuffs sold off the adjoining Bray and Burwell plantations. Between 1765 and 1781 (when production records are relatively complete), the Burwell plantations alone produced enough surplus corn annually to supply the standard adult requirement of three barrels of shelled corn a year for at least 150 non farming adult town residents.¹¹⁸ Ten large plantations producing at a comparable level could have supplied all of Williamsburg's needs for corn to feed both the humans and their urban animals. Great planters of course were not the only area farmers producing surplus grains, so it is clear that urban needs could be easily met from nearby plantations.

Notes: The figures in brackets are estimations. For whites, it was assumed that there were equal numbers above and below 16, the approximate proportion in a Maryland census of 1755. The number of adult black females, following Kelly, "The People of York County, p. 9. was estimated by applying the child-adult ratio reported for black males.
Meat consumption was estimated as follows. For adult white males 1 lb. per day, for adult white females .83 lb. per day, for white children .6 lb. per day. For adult black males and females 1 lb per week; for black children .5 lb. per week.
Corn consumption was estimated at 3 bbls. per year for all adults and 1.5 bbls. for all children. Wheat consumption was estimated at 2 bu. per year for adult white men, 1.66 bu. per year for adult white women, and 1.2 bu. for children.

Notes: Quantities of products sold is understated for the 1750s, 177273, and the 1780s, years for which the plantation records are incomplete. Butter sales were probably reported only in the early 1740s and for the 1760s. Meat sales are slightly understated since some unspecified quantities could not be included, no attempt was made to convert some parts of animals sold into pounds where the weight of the piece was not stated, and sales of a small number of live cattle and sheep were omitted, since some of these may have been sold for breeding purposes rather than for meat.

Williamsburg's wheat requirements were probably quite modest. A variety of records from Chesapeake plantations make it clear that corn was the predominant grain consumed in the countryside; even elite rural families reserved only a few bushels out of a year's crop for household use. Urban household accounts, discussed below, make it clear that town dwellers did consume more wheat bread than countryfolk. Cultural preferences may well have played a role, especially among European immigrants, as did the ability, seldom present in the countryside, to purchase ready-baked bread in town. For town dwellers who lacked the time or the domestic staff to prepare meals that needed long cooking, wheat bread was a decided convenience. Still we are certain that they ate far less than the pound of wheat bread a day that it is estimated adult laborers in Philadelphia ate at this time. A pound of bread per week, or about one bushel of wheat per year, appears much closer to the mark.¹¹⁹ However in this estimate we set consumption for the white population at 2 bushels per year for adult men and proportional amounts for women and children. The half of Williamsburg's population who were enslaved surely consumed little or no wheat. So when one adds in the even greater amount of wheat flour sold from Burwell's mill in its years of maximum production (1776-78), it appears that a single big plantation was capable of providing between a third and a half of Williamsburg's likely demand for this grain. Consequently it becomes immediately clear that production of grains for local urban markets was an option only for a limited number of planters and farmers in immediately surrounding areas.

Provisioning of livestock, however, was another matter. Over the same period, the Burwell plantations produced enough surplus pork and beef to feed only 10 town dwellers at the rate of a pound of meat per day, the customary allotment for soldiers and free male laborers, and up to 70 at the niggardly provisioning rate of a pound of meat per week then customarily allotted to adult plantation slaves.¹²⁰ Urban demands for meat thus appear to have had a much broader impact on farmers in both surrounding and more distant areas than did demands for grain, a finding that validates our initial decision to place special emphasis on this subject in our research design. Large planters in the immediate area could and did increase meat production to some extent, but, absent a through going commitment to intensive livestock husbandry, they could not supply town demands for meat on nearly the same scale as they could town demands for grain. Some rough calculations based on Williamsburg's census for 1775 illustrate the magnitude of the difference. If one allots the free male population age 16 and over a pound of meat per day, free adult females .83 pound, those under 16 years .6 pound, and the adult slaves a pound per week 65 and the children half a pound per week, then the meat requirements of the total population would have been about 300,000 pounds a year. Pork and beef sold off Carter's Grove averaged only 3,600 pounds a year between 1769 and 1778, just over 1% of the estimated need of the resident population. The pull of urban meat markets thus affected not only some as yet unidentified combination of large, middling, and small planters in the immediate hinterlands of the town, but of more distant producers as well.

Although the total populations of Williamsburg and Annapolis were of similar size across much of the period studied here, it is likely that their total provisioning requirements differed somewhat. At the outbreak of the Revolution, only half of Williamsburg's residents were whites or free blacks, but in Annapolis, free persons were 65% of that town's population. Evidence from probate inventories suggests that slaves were proportionately fewer in Annapolis than in Williamsburg in earlier years as well. The higher proportion of whites in Annapolis likely meant that Annapolitans' aggregate demand for meat and wheat was somewhat greater than that of Williamsburg residents overall. Any additional wheat the larger free population of Annapolis may have consumed would have been too small to have any impact on surrounding farms. But the analysis of rural meat production presented here, coupled with the archaeological evidence, suggests that the protein demands of only a few extra free households were sufficient to affect livestock management strategies among local farmers.

Moreover, the individual plantation records we analyzed for this project, as do the records of other Chesapeake farmers, suggest that planters found it much easier to expand outputs of surplus pork than of beef. Additional hogs could be fattened on inferior corn, the supply of which increased with expanded corn production, and on bran, a by-product of milling, while the number of cattle that a planter could maintain remained much more dependent on available and increasingly stressed woodland and pasture resources. The evidence from the plantation records shows that in the last half of the eighteenth century, large planters were not producing nearly as much surplus beef as they were pork. Given the clear archaeological evidence of consumption of nearly equal proportions of beef and pork, it follows that urban residents regularly drew on more distant sources for beef than they likely did for pork.

A. OVERVIEW OF SOURCES OF SUPPLY, CONSUMER STRATEGIES, AND MARKET ORIENTATION

In addition to direct purchase of foodstuffs from large area planters, Chesapeake town dwellers also turned to other, town based sources to supply some of their dietary wants and needs. This section addresses these other sources of supply-self-sufficient production, town markets, intermediate processors, retail stores, mills, taverns, and petty hucksters. As town populations grew across the eighteenth century, markets and middlemen played an expanded role in town provisioning, and relations between consumers and producers began to change, shifting to some extent from ad hoc personal exchanges to the more impersonal relationships characteristic of large cities like Baltimore. Williamsburg, Annapolis, and even Norfolk and Richmond had not yet reached this scale, but even in these towns, residents were not totally isolated from the forces of increasingly integrated national and international markets in the early years of the new republic.

In small-scale regional market systems such as the one that developed in the Chesapeake early in the eighteenth century, the business of provisioning was conducted largely on the basis of personal, face-to-face relationships. Some Williamsburg residents kept a cow or two in town, or they owned a nearby plantation from which they could obtain food, while others depended upon kin or friends living in the nearby countryside to provide them with food. Families who lacked these economic and social resources purchased meat and other produce from area planters like the Burwells and Brays, or at the local marketplace from smaller farmers and from slaves. Middlemen such as merchants, butchers, and other purveyors of regionally-produced foods initially had a relatively small role to play in provisioning urban consumers.

As the eighteenth century progressed, Williamsburg's population increased and the availability of lands in town where livestock could be kept diminished. As a result of this urban growth, middlemen increasingly took over the role of urban provisioning, and urban households came to rely to a greater and greater extent on commercially-produced foods. The extent to which individuals relied upon these sources varied, depending upon their own inclination as well as their personal resources. Some continued to grow foods in their gardens, or keep livestock nearby in pastures and in stalls; some no doubt continued to obtain foods from their personal networks; others bought varying amounts from merchants, butchers, and the marketplace.

Following accepted practice, townspeople who owned livestock could let them run freely on nearby lands. But beginning as early as the first decades of the eighteenth century, attempts were made to restrict the presence of livestock in town. As the numbers of grazing livestock increased, nearby lands felt the impact of too many animals, and laws were passed to protect the landowner's ability to maintain his own herds. In the town of West Point in 1713, those living in 68 town who had no freehold or tenancy in lands were restricted to keeping only two cows and two horses.¹ No doubt this forced a change on urban husbandry practices.

Probate inventories left by Williamsburg residents indicate that during the first half of the eighteenth century, only a few urban residents owned large numbers of cattle. James McKindo, for instance, owned 49 cattle, including cattle, cows, and calves, and Giles Moody owned 34 head, but generally those who left probate records owned at the time of their death one or maybe two cows and a calf. By the 1760s and 1770s, it appears very few kept large herds, although William Prentis owned 42 head of cattle when he died in 1765, and Governor Francis Fauquier owned 22 head in 1772. Generally speaking, large herds had receded to the countryside.

Bones thrown away by urban diners can often help elucidate the relationships that existed between the regional agricultural system, the urban market, availability of staple foods, and degree to which urban households depended upon commercial food sources. Zooarchaeologists, who have worked with bones from ancient civilizations where large-scale market systems evolved, have developed three means to measure the degree of urban dependency on commercially-produced foods: age profiles, dietary diversity, and element distributions.² In an urban environment, age profiles from domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep should show a specialized form of animal husbandry. The variety and relative importance of different animals should reveal whether the combination of decreased habitat in urban areas and decreased contact with rural residents markedly reduced the availability of wild animals for urban consumers. Element distributions of the major domestic mammals should show the effects of commercial butchery and marketing. Taken as a whole, these pieces of evidence measure the extent to which a provisioning system had become specialized.³

In practice, interpreting these changes has been an extremely complex task. The group of faunal assemblages that has been pulled together for the Chesapeake, however, has provided an unparalleled opportunity to explore the intricacies of provisioning in complex societies. Rural assemblages date from the first decades of settlement through the early nineteenth century, and urban assemblages date from the first years when Williamsburg and Annapolis were established through the colonial period. Together the rural and urban assemblages have helped to identify in greater detail that ever before the complexities of urban provisioning as it was played out in a plantation economy based on slave labor and the commercial production of tobacco.

B. MARKETS IN THE CHESAPEAKE

The wealthy planter Robert Carter moved from his plantation to Williamsburg in 1761. Three years later he was forced to purchase a "small settlement" nearby to provision his family. He explained that "every family here have small Farms; which supply them with Articles to be bought in good Markets." He saw the paradox: "such a Custom must inevitably bar every attempt towards improving Markets." Without a good market, town residents had to come up with a system to provision their own households; without demand of these customers, it was difficult to support a good market. Carter reluctantly followed the example of his neighbors and bought a nearby farm.¹⁴

We do not know what Carter determined to be a "good market" but no doubt implied good quality food supplied at good price and with predictable supply. The market in eighteenth-century Virginia was a civic institution, part of an economic system, and part of an urban cultural 83 landscape. This section will address the nature of the market, its history in the Chesapeake, and its larger evolution in producers, consumers, and products.

C. MILLS

Urban households needed corn (ground to meal) or wheat (processed to various grades of flour) for multiple provisioning needs Mills were links in the provisioning chain in multiple directions. Farmers needed mills for their own household use, local processing of wheat and corn, or export. Mill customers were also both professional and home bakers. The larger shift in the Chesapeake from tobacco to wheat also led to increased need for mills to process wheat for flour export. These two factors-urban growth and export-led to a rapid growth in the number of mills in the Williamsburg area in the eighteenth century (Table 3.8).

Only around mid-century did the region support an increase in the number of mills. Nine mills served the area between 1740-1769, while that number increased to 14 water/water grist mills after 1770. The latter time period reflects both increased export of wheat and flour but also a greater wartime need for provisioning.

Williamsburg's tidewater location meant that grist mills could easily be built on the many streams that crisscrossed York County, James City County, and further north and east to New Kent and Charles City County. In trying to assess the importance of Williamsburg as a market, we wanted to know the locations of these mills and whether they suggested an orientation toward town customers or the export trade (Figs. 3.3-3.6). Only one water-powered mill before 1740 fell within an area under two miles from Williamsburg. After 1740 the number of mills quadrupled in the 2-4 mile range from Williamsburg, The growth spurt of mills farther away from the town center (5 to 10 miles) awaited the later eighteenth century.

The closest town mill was probably Ludwell's Mill. At least one town resident, St. George Tucker, had an arrangement with the mill to annually supply "Indian Corn, Indian Meal, and Hominy" for family use and settle up at the end of the time. A ticket system based on playing cards was devised as an accounting system so that illiterate people-probably slaves-could carry out the transactions.

A mill book survives for Carter's Grove covering the years 1775 through 1778. There Burwell manufactured much of the corn and wheat his plantations produced into meal and flour, as well as some grain purchased from area planters. Most was sold to neighbors and to townsfolk and professional bakers in Williamsburg and Yorktown. His was not a large scale mill geared to 101 Figure 3.3. Mills, 1700-1719.
(Dates are based on documented references.) Figure 3.4. Mills, 1720-1739. Dates are based on documented references.) 102 Figure 3.5. Mills, 1740-1769
(Dates are based on documented references.) Figure 3.6. Mills, 1770-1784
(Dates are based on documented references.) the export trade, so we were surprised to discover marked seasonality in its operation. Between January and early August Burwell's miller ground little but corn, which was sold in the form of meal and to a lesser extent coarser hominy. Not until early spring were planters certain by how 103 much the previous year's crop would exceed plantation needs and could be safely marketed, and it was at this time that they shelled out and sold off their surpluses. Then between mid August and December the mill produced primarily wheat flour. The first of the wheat from the early July harvest was threshed and delivered to millers during these months. Town residents could not be certain of buying corn meal from the mill towards the end of the year, nor of getting flour early in the season. Consequently we must suppose that they either had to buy ground grains when they were most available and store reserves of meal and flour to carry them across the short season, or else to purchase part of the year from storekeepers or other dealers who presumably maintained more regular stocks.

D. STORES

Beyond the bounds of the marketplace, the most common point of sale for the provisioning of urban households was the retail store. Merchants were instrumental in supplying towns with imported goods from around the British Empire. Along with the massive flow of textiles, tools, and teacups came tea, coffee, spirits and wine. Stores also stocked foodstuffs, like sugar, spices, relishes, pickles, cooking oils, citrus fruit, cheese, and preserved fish. Any easily transportable foodstuffs that were grown in one place and shipped to another could also appear on the merchant's shelf.

The influx of the so-called new groceries (like tea and spices) from the Far East helped define new forms of the store trade in England and the colonies. The growth of these commodities were both fed by and led to new forms of consumption. Because tea drinking and more refined foodways were new forms of behavior, their choice led to new consumers. Because these items were used up and needed rapid replacement, they led to an increasing number of store visits. This combination led to a larger number of outlets. These commodities were sold side-by-side with a vast range of other manufactured goods in many small stores, but specialized outlets also developed called grocers.

It was the intersection of this long-distance trade with local suppliers that define colonial Chesapeake stores, especially those in urban areas. The importance of foodstuffs as a commodity led to a mixing of the sale of imported groceries and local foods like meat and corn. In England, these two sectors would more likely be separated into two institutions: village shops vended groceries and specialized public markets distributed meat and grain. This divergence lies at the heart of the changed role of merchants in the provisioning of urban places.

E. TAVERNS

The role of taverns in provisioning colonial towns is nowhere more evident than in colonial capitals as centers of government and trade. The swelling of the town's population when courts or assemblies met does much to complicate the problem of the supply of food to both humans and horses. How Williamsburg and Annapolis tavern keepers met that demand vividly demonstrates the flexibility of the system that relied on local planters, stores, butchers, owners of grazing land, sellers of wood, and exchange of tavern keepers themselves.

Taverns in Williamsburg and Annapolis provided a wide variety of food. Tavern fare and prices were regulated by law with the main concern being price. Most meals were simple and based on readily obtained and more inexpensive supplies, such as poultry, bacon, eggs, and bread. The tavern keeper had to be ready for whoever came and perhaps could not always predict business. The regular large business in Williamsburg and Annapolis, however, led to a clear hierarchy of eating establishments known and frequented by wealthier officials and business people. Better fare was available. William Byrd often recorded his meals. At Wetherburn's tavern, he chose a wide range of meats from the common chicken and bacon to veal, venison, mutton, and beef. Special dinners were also often held to celebrate political events. The range of foods and the quantity of people served meant that tavern keepers had to arrange a large and regular supply of multiple foodstuffs.

The tavern keeper Jane Vobe relied on Anderson and Low's store for numerous tavern supplies. She made 86 purchases that could be related to her tavern business between December 1784 and October 1785 totaling £35. She made a payment of £14 toward her bill in August. All fell in the traditional grocery line of retail stores. About half of the purchases were loaf and brown sugar, summing a bit more than 60 % of her food expenditures. She relied on the store for 220 dozen lemons and 25 dozen limes. She obviously obtained her alcohol from another source but stopped by the store for bottles of ale and beer, purchased in half dozen quantities. She needed a bottle of shrub at the end of May. She never purchased tea but may have run out of her supply of coffee, purchasing 4 pounds on each of four occasions in June. Two pounds of chocolate was needed on October 7 and October 14; a bottle of lime juice on May 20 and another on May 23. Six cheese purchases were made in March and April.

She also purchased a number of objects for cooking and serving food. Six dozen knives and forks were added to her stock in April, a week later she needed a ladle. A mug must have broken; she bought one in April as well. On May 18 she bought a skillet and two bowls. She even needed a blank book to keep accounts. A half dozen cups and saucers, a wash hand basin, six yards of sheeting and an empty hogshead were all probably needed at the tavern.

She spent a large sum of money in this casual, probably as-needed basis. While we do not know the sum of her business, only lemons and sugar were purchased in large enough quantities to imply a regular supply and they were marketed so seasonally that they may have merely been as she was awaiting shipment from somewhere else. What is clear is that her needs were quite seasonal; she spent 60% of her money at the Anderson and Low store between May and the end of August when she also made her only payment.

Tavern keepers also relied on local merchants for local agricultural commodities. William Lightfoot kept a store in Yorktown, but had a number of Williamsburg customers for meat and livestock. The tavern keeper with the largest account with Lightfoot was Alexander Finnie, a wigmaker by trade who owned the Raleigh Tavern and twenty acres for stabling and pasturing livestock. He had sold the tavern in 1752 but still ran the business. (Washington dined at Finnie's in the fall of 1754.) In April 1754 and January 1755, he purchased £31 pounds of beef, mutton, veal, and pork. His payment included corn and exchange of debts; credit was given for Lightfoot's bill at the tavern and a sum of money owned him by William Byrd.

Other tavern keepers relied on Lightfoot's store. John Duncastle also purchased a large quantity of pork, beef, and mutton but made no payment. Christiana Campbell, Anthony Hay, and Henry Wetherburn also bought small quantities of meat.

A full picture of the provisioning system of Williamsburg tavernkeepers is beginning to unfold in the study of the Anne Pattison account book. This is currently being analyzed by Heather Wainwright, who is writing a master's thesis on the topic. Much of the following brief analysis is based on her work.⁸¹

Anne Pattison was a recent emigrant from England who married Thomas Pattison in 1738. He was operating a tavern at his death in 1742. Recently widowed, with no children, or other local family, Anne Pattison made the choice of many town women: to enter the food and drink trade. An account book of that business is extant from January 1744 to April 1749. The inventory at her husband's death shows that this was a well-furnished tavern; her list of customers illustrates that it was a favorite one. Her customers ranged from the most elite to middling tradesmen.⁸²

Pattison relied on a large number of local rural and urban people to run her business. James Bray supplied wood and cider and (on her husband's account) mutton, veal, and corn. Henry Taylor supplied a quarter of beef; Daniel Matthews sold her six hens and a shoat. Fellow tavern keeper Alexander Finnie supplied her with a few bottles of wine and claret, and sold her (for cash) 20 fowls. The supply of butter was a particularly large network. She purchased firkins of butter from Thomas Brewer, Mr. Hutchins the Taylor, and at William Holt's store. She also sold butter to a number of town residents, usually just several pounds. Mr. Dangerfield purchased a pound of butter three times in two days, one pound "at night sent to you." Bread came from the tavernkeeper Joseph Gillam. This was probably made by his wife, who also supplied bread weekly 113 to Robert Lyon, a local wigmaker. Other women were part of her provisioning system: Sarah Jones supplied her with ducks and Mrs. Lewis with oysters.

Despite intense local competition for trade, tavern keepers apparently engaged in a network of exchange among themselves. Matthew Moody supplied pasturage for her and her customers; John Taylor gave her fifty lemons in return for four gallons of wine. Joseph Gillam supplied a small quantity of bread.

Tavern keepers continue to confirm our story of provisioning Williamsburg. They purchased beef, pork, corn, and mutton from large local planters like James Bray. Others may have turned to their most frequent customers from out of town. John Page of Caroline County paid part of his large bill with James Southall with 345 pounds of beef. ⁸³ They purchased from local merchants, who combined the retail trade with large-scale purchase and sale of agricultural commodities. Retail merchants who solely concentrated on traditional imported groceries, such as sugar, citrus fruit, alcohol, and cheese were other suppliers. Tavern keepers often shopped and traded on an ad-hoc basis; when their supplies ran out or there were unexpected increases in customers, they went to the store. Many probably had their own kitchen garden and poultry might occasionally settle a debt. What is missing still is the overall supply of alcohol and their market purchases.

F. MISCELLEANEOUS ENTREPRENEURS

Not all suppliers of foodstuffs to the towns were full-time merchants and retailers. Many suppliers were part-time entrepreneurs, taking advantage of rural connections to funnel meat, grains, and other foodstuffs into the towns, while turning a nice profit in the process. One such enterprising moonlighter was Humphrey Harwood, a Williamsburg brick maker and building contractor who supplied his Williamsburg neighbors with agricultural products in the 1780s. His sales of meat, corn, and meal as well as fuel and fodder appeared to be a profitable sideline to his building activities. His account book, kept between 1774 and 1790, details the business transactions related to constructing and repairing buildings and shows clearly how Harwood augmented his income by selling agricultural goods to his clients.

Humphrey Harwood was born some time before 1743. He married twice and had six children before his death in 1788. Williamsburg was his home his entire adult life. From the mid-1760s until his death, he was active in civic affairs, serving on petit and grand juries almost continuously. During the Revolutionary war he became a member of the local militia. Virginia Gazette ads advertising his need for journeymen brick makers indicate that both his business and his main residence were located in town.⁸⁴ Harwood purchased his Williamsburg lots from Frances and William Digges in 1769, and he added another half lot to his town holdings by 1785. Harwood also owned a plantation in James City County. According to James City County personal property tax lists, Harwood's rural property was very profitable. In 1782 he owned five slaves and 17 cattle. Just five years later, the tax assessor recorded eight slaves and 42 cattle.

Brick making and building contracting were Harwood's main business. Most of his clients were his Williamsburg neighbors. George Wythe, Margaret Hunter, Joseph Hornsby, and Dr. Philip Barraud were among the town residents who hired Harwood to repair and construct buildings. The College of William and Mary and the Public Hospital also retained Harwood's services for building work. A few of his customers came from further away. Mr. John Ambler from Jamestown hired Harwood as did Dr. Hall from Petersburg and Thomas Brend from Richmond.

The Humphrey Harwood ledger was kept between 1774 and 1790. Harwood died in 1788 and the account book entries continue in a different hand, presumably that of his son, William, or one of his executors, until 1790. The account book has 133 pages and lists 197 customer accounts. Harwood made no effort to keep his various enterprises separate. The food and grain sales appear mixed in with the building accounts. Indeed, many of his customers purchased both food items and building services from Harwood.

The ledger contains the accounts of 197 customers. Almost seventy of these accounts included some food purchases. Forty-one of the customer accounts included smaller amounts of 115

James Galt from Williamsburg purchased meat from Harwood most frequently-a total of nine transactions. Harwood's largest meat customer in total volume was Mr. John Farqueharson whose one transaction amounted to £163.5. Hubard Watkins purchased grains from Harwood 26 times, the most of anyone in Harwood's account. Many of Harwood's customers paid their debts in grain and meat. Nathaniel Burwell's three credit transactions for grains amounted to £212.4. George Chaplin supplied meat to Harwood on 35 separate occasions, totaling almost £8.

Probably a good proportion of Harwood's sales of agricultural goods came from his own James City County plantation. Yet some evidence in the account book suggests that Harwood 116 was operating as a middleman in addition to a direct supplier. One of Harwood's more interesting economic relationships was with Major Peyton Randolph of Henrico County. Randolph's 1782 account lists debts to Harwood for agricultural work, pasturage of animals, and land taxes in York and James City County. Randolph's payment for these expenses included livestock, cash and more than 13,000 pounds of barley. Harwood does not seem to have sold this barley to his customers in Williamsburg. Rather the grain was delivered to a Mr. Price. The relationship with Peyton Randolph suggests that Harwood may have been operating as a middleman for the exchange of agricultural goods. Harwood probably sold the livestock he received from Randolph as butchered meat some time after 1782.

Humphrey Harwood was a local entrepreneur taking advantage of his ties to the countryside and to planters like Nathaniel Burwell and Peyton Randolph to supply Williamsburg residents with meat and other agricultural goods. He was a direct supplier, but seemed at times to act as a middleman. The periodic nature of his business suggests that his agricultural supply business was only a sideline to his main occupation, offering him occasional opportunities for making profits through the sale of food. Humphrey Harwood provides one direct example of a supplier of meat and grains to Williamsburg.

G. CONCLUSION

The supply of foodstuffs to urban residents in the Chesapeake flowed through multiple institutional channels and passed through the hands of many people. Public markets were the place for the vending of local, usually more perishable products. Some suppliers were institutional. Market butchers paid licenses and fees. Local town councils regulated the size and quality of bread. Many suppliers to public markets, however, were petty entrepreneurs from the fringes of society, such as poor whites, free blacks, and slaves. The sale of foods also spilled out of market bounds onto the streets. Despite these overarching principals, markets in various towns had different features based on local products and markets. Some, like the market in Williamsburg, did not seem to succeed in its goal of centralizing the supply of safe and sufficient foods and residents turned to the local agricultural economy in alternative channels. The more wealthy used their own farms to provision their households. Others relied on local stores that channeled the flow of meat and grains from plantations outside of the local area.

Larger businesses also grew to meet the provisioning needs of the Chesapeake. Changing agricultural production for export and increasing population led to more mills. Taverns, large and small, had to provision themselves before they could cater to the flood of visitors to colonial capitals during public times. They traded with merchants, planters, local residents, and amongst themselves. Stores sold the vast quantities of alcohol that Chesapeake residents craved, as well as the sugar, tea, coffee, and spices that reflect changing cultural behaviors. They also vended meat, grains and smaller quantities of perishables. It is that intersection of international and local that summarized the special qualities of Chesapeake, especially Virginia, urban merchants.

In ways large and small, changes in provisioning foodstuffs through the early nineteenth century redefined how Chesapeake people obtained their food. Zooarchaeological evidence demonstrates the evolution of animal husbandry. Livestock was increasingly raised for butchering for premium market efficiency. Large-scale hog operations developed to produce mass quantities 117 of pork. Large planters switched to wheat. Merchants bought their staples from wholesalers on the coast. All of these behaviors, and more, demonstrate the move toward capitalism as agricultural systems and their chain of distribution supplied even small Chesapeake towns.

A. OVERVIEW OF DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Food, fuel, and fodder distribution networks involved much more than simple, impersonal economic exchanges of produce for cash. Social as well as economic relationships influenced the choice of trading partners, and helped to determine whom sellers would grant credit and whom they would sell to only for ready cash. The plantation records suggest that kin and clientage relationships remained important in the countryside, but were of somewhat less importance in towns like Williamsburg. Large planters like the Burwells chose to deal primarily with townspeople of established reputation and some economic standing, including the doctors, lawyers, government officials, and merchants with whom they interacted in their public roles as justices of the peace, burgesses, and parish vestrymen, and with whom they had other business dealings, and also with craftspeople and tavern keepers whom they and their families patronized. The planters' connections to town residents at the lower end of the economic scale were sparser, and more often limited to irregular sales of small quantities of goods, usually grain or fuel, for cash in hand. For the urban poor, storekeepers, commercial processors, and other middlemen must have been the main source of supply, a circumstance that surely resulted in their paying higher prices for what they bought.

The 1782 Williamsburg census (which lists heads of household by name and total numbers of whites and blacks in each household) is probably fairly complete, covering more individuals than appear on subsequent tax lists and including persons who do not appear in other local records. Materials in the York County biographical files do suggest the census taker missed seven additional households whose heads were present in the town in 1781 and again in 1783, so presumably in 1782 as well. The figures for Williamsburg in 1783 include the 131 residents heads of household assessed for personal property (non residents were eliminated), plus 20 lot holders shown to be resident on the basis of the prosopographical files, plus 10 individuals listed on the 1782 census who were assessed for taxable personal property in 1784 and presumed to be resident in 1783. The 1782 census also includes 47 individuals who are not known to have moved or died, but who could not be traced either to subsequent tax lists or other biographical files, but who may have continued to live in town. None of these individuals owned town lots and most did not own slaves; half were women. These 47 are one quarter of all heads of household, a proportion that we must assume may be missing from most compilations based solely on property tax lists.

Table 4.1 shows the occupational composition of Williamsburg and Annapolis households in 1782-83, and Table 4.2 shows household size for the occupational groups. From Table 4.2 it is clear that professionals, merchants, artisans, and tavern keepers were larger customers not just because of their greater wealth, but also because of their greater needs for food and fuel. 120

B. CUSTOMERS OF LARGE PLANTERS AND COMPOSITION OF THEIR PURCHASES

The plantation accounts suggest that transactions between big planters and rural buyers were often heavily influenced by kin, friendship, and clientage relations. The Carter's Grove Burwells on occasion accommodated their planting kinsfolk living on nearby plantations with exchanges of grain, food for livestock, and meat to balance out seasonal shortfalls on one or other of the plantations. They sometimes sold provisions, exceeding the customary allowance, to their quarter overseers and farm managers, as well as to free rural artisans and laborers who worked, periodically, on their plantations. Occasionally they accommodated important town customers such as royal governors, by arranging the purchase and resale of fodder and grain from smaller planters living nearby. Neighboring planters sometimes brought their grain to be ground at the Burwell and Bray mills in exchange for the customary miller's toll (one sixteenth of each barrel of corn brought for grinding into hominy and one eighth of each barrel of corn or bushel of wheat brought for grinding into flour). Sometimes they also purchased small amounts of corn meal, wheat flour, and, during and after the Revolution, whiskey, directly from the miller. Nathaniel Burwell II also supplied by-weekly provisions for two rural Yorkhampton parish paupers, and supplied some food to workers on the farm of an orphan whose estate he administered. Many of 122 the rural transactions, then, reflect the tight-knit networks of kin, friends, and neighbors, and personalized, face-to-face relationships with a strong social content that many historians have described as characteristic of rural communities.

Exchanges of this sort were, however, not the primary ones in which the big planters engaged. Rural customers were less numerous than urban ones, and most of them did not buy frequently or in large quantities. Overall, the Burwells and Bray sold produce primarily to Williamsburg professionals, artisans, merchants, tavern keepers and other service providers including bakers and butchers, and institutional customers. The College of William and Mary was among the Burwells' largest buyers in terms of the value of their purchases, and during the Revolutionary War Nathaniel Burwell II supplied the Virginia government with immense quantities of firewood. The royal governors, Fauquier and Botetourt, depended almost exclusively on rural suppliers like the Burwells for the large quantities of meat, grain, and fodder their establishments required. Otherwise, the town gentry appear to have provisioned themselves primarily from their own plantations. With the exception of Thomas Bray, who obtained many of his needs from his son James's Littletown plantation, and members of the Nelson family, who provisioned their Yorktown households to a large extent from Carter's Grove during William Nelson's tenure as executor, other elite families were apparently purchasing little and infrequently from area planters.

Williamsburg doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers, and government officers on the other hand, were among the big planters' most frequent and largest customers. This group, along with the artisans, included a goodly proportion of immigrants who were accustomed to obtaining provisions through the market. In addition, a number of the Virginia-born professionals did not yet own operating plantations and hence were also largely dependent on nearby planters. Providers of services like tavern keepers, bakers, and butchers, turned to big planters, as well as to merchants and other middlemen, for the not always predictable supplies of meat, grain, and fuel their businesses required. Town merchants purchased heavily from surrounding big planters, for provisioning their own households, for stocks of goods to be resold locally, and for grain intended for export in inter-regional and inter-national markets. More affluent widows and independent single women living in town also supplied their households extensively with produce from surrounding large plantations.

Different distribution networks for meat and grain are evident even in the records of these four producers-Bray, Nelson, and Carter and Nathaniel Burwell. Nearly 250 urban and rural customers bought grain from these planters, but only 150 obtained some or all of their meat from this source. Table 4.3 documents the number of purchasers and number of purchases of meats from these two nearby plantations. Frequency of purchase is one of the measures we are employing to study customer behavior. Quantities purchased and total value of purchases are two others. Each measure has strengths and weaknesses. Intensity of exchange is not always captured by measures of value or of quantity. Values are usually available even when quantity is indefinite. Total quantities purchased may give a better sense of the scope of the exchange than number of transactions. And so on. We have further work to do in sorting out the different insights that these three measures can supply. At this point it is clear that professionals and governmental officials were the most frequent buyers of various meats. They were followed in terms of frequency of 123

Large planters supplied their urban customers with pork, usually in the form of freshly killed whole animals, during the late fall/early winter slaughter time prevailing in the countryside and almost certainly by prior arrangement. They also supplied beef, veal, mutton, and lamb in their appropriate seasons, likely also by prior arrangement. These meats were sold in fairly large units, usually whole animals in the case of lambs and sometimes of muttons. The larger beasts were also often sold by the side or the quarter. The planters clearly sought to keep down processing and distribution costs, and probably pilfering as well, by selling mature sheep, calves, and sometimes old cattle as well in minimally butchered units. Not surprisingly then it was householders and business people who could use and afford to pay for meat in quantity who bought from the large planters.

On the other hand, the big planters supplied grains to a much wider range of urban and rural customers. Although it is clear, especially from the account book for the mill, that Carter's Grove slaves (and in the mid 1770s also a professional white wagoner) regularly carted grain into 124 town for frequent buyers (and probably also for some chance customers), others who purchased grain likely took care of the transportation themselves. People who bought small quantities at the mill or directly from the plantation would have carried the grain away on horseback or in their own carts, and merchants often arranged for the transport of large volume purchases.

The Burwells clearly trusted their general manager, quarter overseers, and millers to conduct grain sales and to collect the proceeds. Very possibly Burwell had instituted a ticket system similar to that described by an area miller owner in 1800 "for more easy keeping, adjusting and settling Accounts between the parties." The customer paid a sum in advance guaranteeing a supply of corn, meal, and hominy from the mill. When the customer needed grain, he was to "send a [pre-issued] Ticket in writing . . . specifying the Quantity of Indian Corn which may require, and whether the same shall be delivered without grinding, or shall be ground into meal, or homony....the Tickets so sent shall annually, or oftener, if desired be returned, and thereupon a receipt expressing the full amount thereof shall be given..., and the said Tickets and receipts shall be deemed the only and necessary and sufficient Vouchers between the parties." The tickets were fashioned by cutting up decks of playing cards; in this example red spades signified hominy and black aces, meal, orders that could be readily understood by either unlettered free workers or illiterate slaves.¹

C. CUSTOMERS OF STORES AND COMPOSITION OF THEIR PURCHASES

As discussed in the previous chapter, stores were conduits for multiple systems of exchange. Alcohol and sugar linked merchants to Norfolk and the West Indies trade. Many imported groceries were purchased from London, Glasgow and the northern ports. Meat, corn, and other agricultural commodities flowed from many plantations, some outside of the immediate local region. Merchants were not major suppliers of bread nor of local perishables, although they accepted some in credit at their stores.

The mercantile activity of customers in seven store accounts in the towns of Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Annapolis form the data for this study. Each purchase of food and alcohol was coded, individual items were grouped into larger categories, and residence and occupation were assigned. While all these stores were urban, their customers were not. Sixty percent of the 346 customers were rural. These customers made about 3000 purchases summing to £6000 local currency. Rural people spent about 70% of that total.

Rural and urban people had different spending patterns at these stores. Nearly half of the rural people bought sweeteners, while only 38% of the urban ones did so. Similar patterns were found in the sale of alcohol. Half of the rural residents but only 36% of the urban residents chose alcohol. A third of the urban people bought tea and coffee, but only a quarter of rural ones did. Food grains were more similar between the two groups: 15% of urban customers bought grains, 18% of rural customers made that choice. The biggest difference lay in the purchase of meat. 125 Almost a third of urban residents but only 20% of the rural ones relied on the store for at least some part of their meat supply.

The staples of merchants' businesses were clearly the West Indies products; alcohol (mostly rum) and sugar (mostly loaf sugar) were over half of these purchases. They were consumed (quite literally, used up) often and formed the bulk of customer expenditures. Nonetheless, stores were major suppliers of meat for both rural and urban people; more than 10% of their purchase costs were for meat. Tea and coffee were slight indicators of urban living: while the proportion of money spent was similar, tea and coffee were purchased twice as frequently by urban people than rural ones. This probably suggests the more frequent purchases of smaller amounts.

These stores catered to a broad cross-section of the urban and nearby rural population. Of those we could identify, the most common customers at these stores were planters (31.3%), followed by other merchants (17.7%) and tavern keepers (11.8%). Professionals also used these stores in large numbers (7.7%). Carpenters and others in the building trades were equaled by the number of overseers (4.4% each). Retail craftspeople formed the last significant group; they were another 4% of the purchasers. The rest followed miscellaneous occupations.

These were overwhelmingly the purchases of households headed by men. While women were always important customers in urban stores (particularly in the purchase of textiles and household items), they are most often hidden behind a husband or father's name in accounting practices. Despite these constraints, women account holders made up eight percent of the purchases in these accounts.² Seven percent of the purchases were made by a number of institutions, including the College of William and Mary, parishes, poor houses, "the Colony," "the Commonwealth," etc.

To fully explain the patterns of customer expenditures, it is necessary to look at individual suppliers. Each of these merchants had different strategies to supply their stores and each had customers that differed in time or place and could express different behavior. The following are brief snapshots of the current analysis of seven businesses. Each will briefly introduce the business and the merchant, describe the account book, then summarize some basic patterns of consumption. The circular nature of this business means that supply and consumption are integrally linked and will both be discussed. We know more about some of these businesses than others, so the brief accounts are not always parallel in their depth. Virginia stores will be discussed first, followed by Maryland businesses.

D. PROVISIONING FUEL AND FODDER

Fuel for cooking and heating was an essential need for all town residents. Given high transport costs, the supply had to come from the local area unless the towns were accessible to water transport. Much of our information on urban fuel supplies comes from land locked Williamsburg where the sole source was the immediately surrounding countryside. (Scattered plantation records for the hinterlands of Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., demonstrate that after the Revolutionary War landowners who could harvest and transport firewood to these markets by water were quick to take advantage. By the early 1800s such planters used their own slaves or else employed free blacks to cut down pine cordwood and to harvest wood from swamps during the winter in order to provision town markets.) Town residents who owned nearby farms likely supplied their heating and cooking needs from off these lands. Those who did not own adjoining rural land had to rely on neighboring planters like Bray and the Burwells, who earned extra income by having their slaves cut firewood during the winter and cart it into town, or on more transient suppliers who have left no trace of their activities in surviving records. At the lower end of the economic scale, it is possible that some households in towns like Williamsburg still supplied themselves at least in part by scavenging fallen wood in surrounding woodlands.

At this point it is impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy the requirements of Chesapeake town dwellers for heating and cooking. Presumably their requirements for warmth were somewhat less than those estimated for more northerly towns like Philadelphia. On the other hand, the greater propensity of Chesapeake townsfolk to relegate cooking to separate outbuildings would have increased total household requirements for the combined purposes of heating and cooking. Assuming from the basis of Williamsburg's 1782 census of a total of 182 135 households, and apportioning an estimated 48 affluent households at a high consumption estimate of 25 cord per year, 59 households at a middling estimate of 12.5 cords per year, and 75 households at the minimal estimate of 5 cords a year, the resident householders would have required at least 2,300 cords of firewood per annum. Clearly many suppliers were involved in meeting such urban requirements.⁶

The total output of the plantations we analyzed is problematic in that, until 1776, they recorded production only in cartloads of undefined volume. Between 1742 and 1744 Bray was supplying Williamsburg residents with an average of 250 loads per year. Production at Carter's Grove in 1767-68 was about 300 loads a year. Apparently governmental agencies, even those in the throes of a civil war, required more precise accounting. In 1776 Nathaniel Burwell started the year valuing a cartload of firewood at 6s, but in November he began selling by the cord at 7s. Possibly the standard "load" was always a cord, and Burwell simply took advantage of the going price paid by the government to raise the price he charged private customers. In 1776 Burwell delivered into Williamsburg just over 2,000 cartloads plus 319 cords of wood, a level of exploitation his plantations clearly could not sustain for long. The next year Burwell's sales amounted to 461 cords, and thereafter dwindled to 25 to 50 a year, although it is not certain that all later wood sales were recorded. Reported prices for a single wood delivery rose after the war, so we have to assume that fuel prices were increasing, as they clearly were in larger cities like Philadelphia, although the ambiguity as to possible changes in the size of the unit normally delivered prevents close measurement.

It appears that before the Revolution Bray and the Burwells may have been managing their relatively abundant woodlands with an eye to marketing small, sustainable harvests of firewood over the long run. This changed during and after the war when the chance to make windfall profits by cutting down and selling off most marketable timber and firewood not required for plantation building, fencing, and fuel apparently proved irresistible. Increased wood sales are also consistent with a shift away from tobacco in favor of grain which required more cleared acres for corn and wheat, and more pastures and improved meadows for livestock. Comments about marked reductions in woodlands in the immediate hinterlands of towns, in the Chesapeake and elsewhere, frequently appear in early national period sources. This inevitably raised the price of fuel, as townspeople had to turn to increasingly distant sources of supply.⁷

As a rule these large planters delivered firewood primarily to regular customers, often during the winter on a prearranged schedule, either weekly or biweekly during colder weather. In the early 1740s Bray usually charged either 5s 6d or 6s for a load of wood. (Bray had made arrangements with one William Bryan to supply wood at the 5s 6d rate, while he charged 6s for wood his own slaves delivered. The two prices may reflect the use of carts of different capacity, or else Bryan was willing to provide wood at a slightly lower price than Bray.) However Bray also offered a discount of 1s per load to large customers who agreed to purchase their entire season's supply from him. Between May and November 1743, for example, Williamsburg tavern 136 keeper Ann Pattison paid 5s instead of 6s each for 51 loads of wood "because you are a large customer". Bray offered John Burdett, another Williamsburg tavern keeper, the same option. He could buy individual loads at "5/6 unless you are a Customer for the Year, if You are, then @ 5/." Burdett, it seems, opted to buy from several suppliers, since he paid 5s6d for the 29 loads he purchased that year from Bray.

After the Revolution, Nathaniel Burwell II often marketed firewood in town on a ticket system similar to that described above for grain. Customers who had previously paid for a supply of firewood presented the requisite tickets to the slaves or free wagoner who made the deliveries. Anyone who bought more tickets than he or she needed could sell them to others. This system was definitely not a recent innovation, for the Bray accounts include a mention of wood tickets in the 1740s. The fuel delivery system was thus a relatively sophisticated one through which planters often received payment in advance and one that minimized the need for workers who made the deliveries to handle cash. Negotiation of yearly contracts or purchase of tickets assured customers of a certain and regular supply of fuel. Such acquisitions allowed them to plan in advance the amounts of firewood they would cut and market in any given year.

Table 4.11 tabulates the Williamsburg residents who bought firewood from Bray and the Burwells. Town professionals, artisans, tavern keepers and other service providers predominated. Clearly one or two large area plantations were insufficient to meet the town's needs. Presumably gentry households supplied themselves from their own farms, and poorer folk bought small quantities of firewood (presumably at higher prices) from other suppliers on the open market.

The evidence from the plantation accounts regarding purchases of fodder and straw for provisioning urban livestock is considerably clearer. The primary purchasers of corn fodder and wheat straw were the royal governors, a few town-dwelling gentry families, and town professionals. These supplemental livestock foods must then have been used almost exclusively to feed the carriage horses of elite town residents or gentry visitors during the winter and early spring when grass was in short supply or else to enable doctors and lawyers to keep their horses in high condition so that they could travel at will. Otherwise Williamsburg townsfolk must have fed their milk cows and riding horses with whatever pasturage was available in the immediate area, or else with supplemental grain rather than with purchased fodder. Even tavern keepers, who had to accommodate the equine needs of a variety of travelers, made only a few minor purchases of fodder. Apparently, then, most townspeople managed to provision their livestock from immediate local resources, except only for those who opted for the comfort and status symbol of traveling by carriage.

E. ECONOMICS OF ACQUISITION

In order to determine how different sorts of customers paid for their purchases of foods and fuel, we systematically recorded information on methods of payment from the various account books. At this point we need to do additional work to refine the analysis of means of payment, especially for those who paid for their purchases by more than one means, and to differentiate between long term and short term extensions of credit. However preliminary results show that most buyers of food and fuel paid their big planter suppliers with some combination of cash and of goods or services.

In an economy like that of the colonial and early national Chesapeake where hard money was in short supply, it was a major convenience and sometimes a necessity to conduct as many transactions as possible by bookkeeping offsets that required no actual physical transfers of scarce coin. A preliminary count of methods of payment reveals that 201 customers of Bray and the Burwells paid for food and fuel with cash, 215 paid in goods and services, and just 76 bought on credit. There was considerable overlap between the three groups. Most of those who paid cash not surprisingly were residents of Williamsburg and Yorktown. Some cash payments, especially for small amounts, were made at the time of purchase. More substantial cash payments were made within a few months or at most within a year. Planters and other rural folk were much more likely than townspeople to pay wholly or at least in part with goods and services. But town professionals, merchants, artisans, and service providers also frequently satisfied a portion of their food and fuel bills with offsetting accounts for medical care, legal and other services, and durable goods supplied the planters. How often accounts were balanced and outstanding shortfalls settled by an actual transfer of money depended both on the volume and frequency of transactions between buyer and seller, and upon whether or not exchanges remained relatively equal or became 138 decidedly unbalanced in favor of one of the parties. Payments were made sooner on the unbalanced accounts than on the relatively balanced ones.

Our preliminary analysis suggests that the large planters were decidedly conservative about selling substantial amounts of perishable foods on credit. Only 30 of the 76 credit transactions involved amounts of more then £10, and these purchasers were almost exclusively merchants, professionals, institutional buyers like the state government and the College of William and Mary, and well-established tavern keepers and artisans. Large planters, it appears, engaged in urban provisioning as a disciplined business, and took sensible precautions for avoiding much risk. Although some of their customers did not pay as promptly as the planters might have wished, the planters eventually received almost all sums due. Unlike country storekeepers, whose books were frequently overburdened with a numerous bad debts and long-outstanding balances, in the plantation accounts very few debts were eventually written off as uncollectable, and these were generally for small sums advanced to marginal individuals. Town customers were apparently sufficiently numerous that the big planters could restrict their dealings to solvent and responsible buyers.

A. HOUSEHOLD DIET THROUGH HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS

Nine lists or account books of urban household expenses from Virginia and Maryland were analyzed to understand the kinds of foods purchased, the sources for those items, and the relative dietary expenses of various categories of foodstuffs. These accounts varied widely based on the personal needs of each household or keeper of the accounts; some recorded all foodstuffs, including grocery items and alcohol, and others only regular market purchases. At least one recorded costs of supporting a number of slaves in an industrial setting; others recorded expenses for household slaves. Several were mere jotted notes, others more elaborate bookkeeping forms. Since the number of people represented by these expenses was seldom documented, relative frequencies were often used within households.

Despite our wish to understand all sectors of society, these accounts overwhelmingly represent the elite, the group most likely to document their activities. At one extreme were the records of the managers of kitchens or chefs for a governor of Virginia (Governor Botetourt) and president of the United States (President Jefferson). Most others were merchants or storekeepers. Only one account represented the actions of a lower middling craftsperson. Other forms of evidence can be utilized to examine the diet of the poorer sorts through institutional records for poor relief, and provisioning slaves and hired servants.

Urban residents may have attained more direct self-sufficiency by keeping livestock and growing vegetables in local gardens. Such choices, however, had direct costs. Large kitchen gardens were not common on small urban lots. Livestock needed space, and labor was necessary for butchering and preservation. Cows could be kept for a supply of milk, butter and cheese, but only about half of Williamsburg residents in 1783 made the choice to keep even one animal. In the same way, urban residents were not always reliant on urban systems or urban peoples. These lists of expenses, therefore, can by omission demonstrate a greater degree of self-sufficiency, alternative arrangements not recorded in daily records, or foodstuffs grown on nearby farms. The delicate balance is deciding whether what is not paid for is not part of the diet or is merely not recorded in this accounting system.

B. Household Diet Through Zooarchaeology

The study of subsistence systems is one of the foundations of archaeological interpretations of the past. Since pottery, lithics, glass, bones, seeds, and shells (the last three known in the archaeological world as "ecofacts") are all related to the procurement, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food, archaeologists have reconstructed subsistence systems, which they define as the organized means through which humans obtain nourishment from the landscape. Typically because archaeologists working in North America have studied prehistoric cultures, studies have focused on identifying the "subsistence strategies" used to procure food. Borrowing from this term that has become synonymous with hunting and gathering, an important goal of our research has come to focus on the "provisioning strategies" of urban residents. The approach is to determine, as well as the available documentation will allow, the overall provisioning system, including the agriculture, animal husbandry, and economic and social foundations of the distribution system that carried rural produce to urban market systems, and how individual urban households drew upon their own social and economic resources to obtain nourishment. Faunal evidence (in the form of diversity estimates, slaughter data, and element distributions) works hand-in-hand with documentary sources on every level, helping to identify what different households relied upon. With all these resources marshaled together, a fuller and more complete picture of foodways in colonial America becomes possible. The section that follows is a beginning effort to differentiate how different households worked within their social and economic means to provide nourishment for themselves and their families.