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A Pictorial Booklet

On
Early Jamestown Commodities
And
Industries
By
J. PAUL HUDSON
Jamestown, Virginia
Illustrated by Sidney E. King




VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
1957

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COPYRIGHT©, 1957 BY
J. PAUL HUDSON, JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA
Jamestown 350th Anniversary
Historical Booklet Number 23

INTRODUCTION

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In the pages which follow only a few of many goods and commodities made,collected, or grown at or near Jamestown during the seventeenth centurywill be discussed. No pretense is made to do more than touch lightly onthe ones mentioned most frequently by the early settlers. With theexception of tobacco, grape vines, and herbs, agricultural products areomitted.

Jamestown has never received proper recognition as the place where manyAmerican industries were born in the New World. Few people are awarethat boatbuilding, timbering, glassmaking, tobacco-cultivation,wine-making, iron-smelting, and the making of pitch, tar, potash andsoap-ashes, were carried on in Virginia's colonial capital; nor is itgenerally known that there was production of pottery, bricks and tile,of considerable volume.

Besides the products mentioned in this booklet, attempts were made togrow or produce other items at or near "James Citty"—including cordage,silk-grass, dyes, salt, flax, hemp, alum, white earth, walnut-oil,minerals, sweet-gums, madder, sugar cane, cotton, citrus fruits, olives,bark, roots, and berries. A few brought profits to the planters whileothers, like indigo, cotton, sugar cane, and citrus fruits, resulted infailure. The tropical plants from the West Indies could not, of course,withstand the cold Virginia winters.

Attempts made by the early planters to find commodities and rawmaterials revealed to a large degree the industrial and agriculturalresources of the new colony. The lessons learned at Jamestown—eveninformation derived from the failures—were invaluable ones. For fromthe successful activities carried out in the small huts, in the fields,and in the woodland areas, would later develop industries andagricultural pursuits undreamed of by the early settlers.

[Pg iv] The history of American commodities, like the history of the nation,is no longer a brief one. Three hundred and fifty years have now passedsince the first adventurous Englishman, with musket in hand and earsalerted to the sound of moccasined feet, searched the wilderness area upand down the James River for New World wealth. As time permitted, heworked in his small shop making utilitarian things out of clay, wood,sand, and metal—objects not entirely lacking in beauty. Busy as he waswith these tasks, he still found time to tend his small vineyard andtobacco field. As he worked he may have dreamed of the day when hishogs-heads of sweet-scented tobacco and casks of red wine woul

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