Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880

One: Property Lines and Power before Pharsalia, 1738-1796

Property Lines and Power before Pharsalia, 1738–1796 Pharsalia plantation had two sets of “parents.” The first were southerners : Maj. Thomas Massie, the wealthy Virginia planter who purchased the land from which Pharsalia was made and moved his family and his slaves to the banks of the Tye River at the turn of the century; his nineteen-yearold son William, who married Sarah Steptoe in 1815 and forced his father to carve off part of his estate to support his new family; and enslaved Afro-Virginians like Chester, Jessee, Mirah, and Rachel, and several others , who had been forced to follow Major Massie in his migrations from plantations in Essex County in the Tidewater to Frederick in the Shenandoah Valley and finally to the foot of the Priest, only to be handed over to the Major’s son and set to work making the young man a plantation. The second was the southern landscape they set to work in: a Piedmont forest of chestnut, oak, and hickory on a stretch of gently sloping red-hill land at the foot of the Blue Ridge, cut by mountain spur ridges and fastrunning streams. In the years after the end of the War of 1812, under the tutelage of his father, William Massie sent those slaves to create a plantation landscape, clearing crop fields and building the young man and his wife a house out of the forests and fields at the base of the Priest. A good biography, though, cannot begin at its subject’s birth. It should describe the background of the parents and the setting in which they lived. This is particularly true when telling the life story of an agricultural ecosystem. William Massie and his slaves did not start work until ninety years after white and black southerners had first settled the region. Pharsalia did not spring fully formed from an old-growth forest in the 30 chapter one Blue Ridge foothills. The plantation’s human population, both white and black, were Virginians, and brought the colony’s economy, technology, culture, and social system to that triangle of level ground beneath the Priest. In the years between the arrival of whites along the upper reaches of the Tye River and William Massie’s adulthood, settlers did three things typical of the southern frontier that created a new environment. First, the surveyor of Goochland County, under the direction of Parson Robert Rose and with the approval of the colonial governor in Williamsburg, drew the lines on the land’s surface that would become the boundaries defining the area’s biotic systems in the nineteenth century. Second, a handful of tenant farmers settled inside those property lines and began clearing out the trees and growing crops. Third, Parson Rose, his sons, and their slaves took over from the tenants, shaping the plants, soils, and organic processes of the Piedmont forest to support the more permanent economy and lifestyle of the colonial gentry. By the time William Massie received the property from his father, the land that made up Pharsalia was an agricultural rather than a “natural” environment. A biography of Pharsalia needs to explain how that happened. Lines on the Land Our national mythology describes the early American frontier as a wilderness where ordinary people could find perfect freedom. Supposedly, the old-growth forests of remote places like the Virginia Blue Ridge were untouched by the heavy hand of authority in the eighteenth century. This tale ignores the fact that “virgin” land had to be seized from the Indians before pioneers could enjoy its natural plenty. Just as importantly, pioneers found the forest lands they scouted already being mapped by surveyors working for governments and wealthy businessmen. Survey lines would scarcely have been visible to a traveler in the 1730s. The other species that inhabited the land would have ignored them entirely. Yet these imaginary boundaries would, in time, organize the revolutionary changes human beings would make to the ecology of the region. By the early nineteenth century, the lines that surveyors drew on paper would become the fences that divided plantation and farm, field and forest.1 property lines and power 31 Virginia surveyors worked on behalf of wealthy speculators in land, often engaging in the business themselves. Land speculation became a fixture of the colony’s economy and political order just after the settlement of Jamestown. Struggling to attract settlers to the unprofitable colony, the Virginia Company...