The River Where America Began

By the mid-1670s, a new aristocracy was taking hold in Virginia, especially along the coveted James River waterfront reaches that wedded fertile farmland to a ready stream of ship-laden commerce and communications linking the Old World to the new. Over the next decade alone, a dozen well-placed planters secured royal patents to tracts ranging in size from ten thousand to fifty thousand acres. The rich got richer, moreover, often through insider schemes that manipulated, or outright defrauded the systems of head rights, taxation, custom duties, and land use in the young English foothold in America.

Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along The James