76 Singing Valleys 



burden of shiftless and disorderly members. Moreover, these 

 had already antagonized the Indians who, under Smith's gov- 

 ernment were the colony's friends and feeders in times of 

 want. It is hard to condone the severity of some of Governor 

 Dale's punishments which included the breaking of offenders 

 on the wheel and nailing a man to a tree through his tongue, 

 but the statistics of the colony presented by such able observers 

 as Henry Spelman and Strachey reveal that prosperity followed 

 immediately on the Governor's establishment of strict law, 

 and his order that the communal system be abandoned. Each 

 man was allotted three acres of land, for which he was under 

 duty to pay a yearly tax of six bushels of corn into the public 

 treasury, which was also the public granary. 



Ten years later taxes were being paid in tobacco. The plant 

 which John Rolfe was the first to cultivate in his three-acre 

 lot, and which, even against King James' expressed distaste, 

 had become a salable commodity in London, had already 

 started Virginia on the road to prosperity. 



Virginia went tobacco mad. They grew it in the streets of 

 Jamestown and in the cornlands, until the Council took steps 

 to insure the food crop. Tobacco with its quick return in 

 money was worse than the gold fever. Men forgot that they 

 must eat. To remind them, the Council passed a law prohibit- 

 ing a man from raising more than one thousand tobacco 

 plants. In addition, he was constrained to "raise sufficient cornc 

 for his own needs, and a surplus for those not engaged in 

 agricultural labor." Rolfe estimated that an industrious man, 

 whose chief work was farming, could tend "four akers of 

 corne and 1000 plants of tobacco," and that such a planting 

 should yield grain sufficient for five persons; while the sale of 

 the tobacco would buy apparel for two. 



Actually, by the records, Richard Brewster with three other 

 men raised in one year two thousand eight hundred pounds of 

 tobacco and one hundred bushels of corn. And three boys, who 

 seem to have organized the first "4H Club," reaped a harvest 



