Adoption of the fifty-acre head right also established a second characteristic of Virginia’s land policy: The predominance of relatively large farms. In the English colony of Bermuda, where land was limited, farms were divided into twenty-five acre tracts. When the New England colonies were founded, although land was plentiful, it was parsimoniously granted to settlers on terms that made even a minimal fifty-acre claim near Jamestown seem large. The ease of accumulating head rights in Seventeenth Century Virginia led people to normally patent more land they could clear or expect to farm in their lifetimes. By 1650, and in the last half of the Century, a few ambitious men (including some surveyors) owned as much as 30,000 acres each. In the Eighteenth Century, Virginia’s greedy appetite for land led the most avaricious to claim tracts of more than 100,000 acres. One of the few effective restraints upon such land grabs was the fact that title could not be perfected prior to survey, and some enormous grants lapsed because they could not be surveyed within the time limits imposed. But the desires of planters, large and small, to have as much land as possible had a great impact upon the surveying profession in both creating a demand for their talents and in elevating their status.
It is more difficult to pinpoint the origin of another fundamental aspect of Virginia’s land policy. The prospective owner was allowed the privilege, prior to survey, of selecting the particular piece of land to be patented. Tracts located at the discretion of the patentee were neither required to be contiguous to settled lands, nor to be of any regular shape. As large regions were opened to settlement, choice fertile acres went to whoever first registered entry claims, while undesirable sections often remained in the public domain as wastelands for a generation or more. Though there was some preference for laying out farms in rectangular form, many plats of strange, irregular shapes testify to the popularity of running bounds which conformed to the contours of an owner’s desire to encompass only the best arable fields, meadows, stands of timber, springs, or creeks within a specified acreage. The procedures of indiscriminate location often made the surveyor’s task in laying out land more difficult. But the discretion left to surveyors by the system enhanced their position in society. Complaints throughout the Colonial years about the profession’s abuses in wielding the power to determine who obtained the most desirable lands are far more common than criticisms of land-measuring techniques.
The practice of indiscriminate location does not appear to have arisen from any conscious decision of the Virginia Company or its leaders in the Colony. Initial settlement at Jamestown was a group project, and the ideal of the planned community with farms clustered about a central village prevailed in the minds of officials throughout the early years. But the Company’s ideals framed in London were much modified in the disorganized conditions of Virginia.
(08 Feb 05)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.