Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem

ELEVEN: Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the Impact of European Agriculture, 1620–1820

chapter eleven Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the Impact of European Agriculture, 1620–1820 lorena s. walsh The environment of tidewater Maryland encouraged new settlement patterns.On prime tobacco lands, wealthy seventeenth-century settlers used bound laborers and hand-cultivation techniques that, while they protected the soil, created a different social structure than found elsewhere in the watershed. Changes in markets and productivity and new agricultural techniques and crops altered the appearance of the landscape and resulted in soil depletion and erosion in the watershed. Settlement Patterns In the tidewater Chesapeake, Old World settlers learned to use abundant natural resources in distinctive ways.Local ecologies strongly affected settlement patterns and agricultural systems and were in turn reshaped by the newcomers who claimed dominion of the land.This chapter deals with two main topics: the outlines and social context of European American and African American settlement patterns, and the ways in which dominant crops and agricultural techniques shaped and changed the landscape on individual plantations. In the seventeenth century, a combination of abundant land, scarce labor , an estuarine environment, and the requirements of tobacco culture produced a pattern of dispersed farmsteads scattered loosely along the banks of rivers and streams. This system is shown in Augustine Herrman ’s well-known map of 1670, where plantations occur between onequarter mile and one-and-a-half miles apart (Herrman, 1670; Earle, 1975: 19).The pattern Herrman pictured 200 years ago was corroborated in the late twentieth century by the location of seventeenth-century archaeological sites (Smolek, 1984). Anglo-American farmers selected homesites and farm sites with three things in mind. First in importance were fertile, relatively level, and welldrained soils. Native Americans farmed the very best agricultural soils found in the region, and Anglo-American tobacco planters learned to identify (and sometimes to covet) these most promising sites by closely observing the places where Indians located their villages. New planters drew also on English agricultural traditions as well as on direct observation of the lay of the land and of the forest cover various soils supported (Smolek, 1984; for a local example, see Walsh, 1988). Prime to good soils, especially in southern Maryland, follow the waterways. Regional soil maps demonstrate this general pattern (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1972). Even Coastal Plain soils can vary markedly in agricultural potential and productivity within a short distance, as more detailed areal soil surveys show (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1973, 1974, 1978). Archaeologists have demonstrated that early planters not only chose to settle in the better areas but selected the best soils in those areas. More than 90% of known seventeenth-century Maryland sites are located on or near prime, or at least good, tobacco soils (Smolek, 1984). A second consideration was the water transport needed for the bulky staple crop. Along the Bay, most shoreline elevations are low, and settlers could make landings wherever ravines intersected rivers and creeks. In Maryland and Virginia seventeenth-century homesites were located at a median distance of about 600 feet from the modern shoreline of navigable water. Only about 10% of early sites are found more than 5,000 feet inland (Smolek, 1984). Because their farms lay within a coastal zone just over a quarter of a mile wide, most planters could wrestle their hogsheads to a landing using only the labor available in their households. This was wise, since public and private roads were few and badly maintained, carts and draft animals even scarcer. Ship captains ordered sailors to roll hogsheads from distant plantations to landings, but the owners of such inland tobacco often suffered considerable losses in transit. Close water access was important, but rather than determining farm location in and of itself, it was often a fortuitous by-product of the riverside location of good soils. (For discussions of soil and water access, see Walsh, 1977: ch. 7; Beverley, 1705: 57; Carr, 1974; Menard, 1975a: ch. 2; Middleton, 1953: pt. 1; and Earle, 1975: ch. 2.) In general, inland areas lacked access to water transport and had few Land Use, Settlement, and Agriculture 221 soils suitable for the crucial staple. Some inland soils would yield decent crops of maize, but only inferior tobacco. So long as new settlers could move to undeveloped waterfront tracts farther up the rivers, they continued to take up more distant prime tobacco lands rather than choose inferior interior parcels closer to hand. Even in early...