SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 65 



a certificate entitling one to a share of the profits of the Com- 

 pany and to one hundred acres of land, with a possible second 

 hundred in addition. The second method of acquiring land was 

 by meritorious service. Ministers of religion, physicians, and 

 other public servants, including those who had performed manual 

 labor, were sometimes granted tracts of land as a partial reward 

 for their services to the people of the colony. The third method, 

 and the one which, after the first four decades, became the most 

 common, was known as " head right." Under this right any 

 shareholder who transported to the colony at his own expense 

 a person, bond or free, could secure fifty acres of land for every 

 person so transported, provided such person remained in the 

 colony three years or longer. This right was afterwards extended 

 to settlers who were not shareholders, and finally came to be so 

 laxly administered that any person could secure a patent by 

 merely paying a fee to the secretary of the colony. 



How the land was surveyed. After receiving a right to land, 

 the next question was to get located, or to have the land surveyed 

 and to get possession of it. The first step was to present one's 

 certificate of " head right " to the surveyor and to select some 

 unappropriated tract. It was customary to select land adjacent 

 to the shore of the sea or of a river, so long as any such land 

 remained. It was the practice of the surveyor to adopt the 

 shore as a base and to measure off a line on this base whose 

 length depended upon the size of the tract to be surveyed. 

 From either end of this line, and at right angles to it, lines were 

 run back to the distance of a mile. These two lines, together 

 with the base and back lines, constituted the boundaries of the 

 farm, which was thus rectangular in outline and one mile 

 1 deep. The back lines of the tracts first surveyed formed a base 

 line: for a new series of tracts to be laid off when all the land 

 adjacent to the waterways had been taken up and patented. 1 



1 Cf. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, Vol. I, pp. 531-532. 



