Family Travel
Since all the early Virginia plantations, both large and small, were located either on the rivers or their estuaries, travel was almost entirely by sloop for distances, and by shallop or skiff for brief journeys. The families used such craft to attend church, and the planters to attend Court, the Council or sessions of the Assembly. In the latter half of the century, travel by horseback to the centers, or to attend funerals, or to visit friends, if not too far distant, became popular, especially as horses bred in the Colony had multiplied. The more affluent planters owned numerous horses mentioned in wills and, also, in inventories along with bridles, bits, stirrups and saddles.
In 1679, the Justices of Warwick County noted that a great number of small horses were running wild on "every man's land" and, in consequence, issued an order requiring that horses be penned, in order that the breed in the County "might not be crossed unfavorably." The same year, young Thomas Harris, son of Major William Harris of Henrico County, bequeathed to "my cousin Richard Ligon all my horses, mares or foals that can be proved to be mine ... they not being given by my grandfather into the hands of the overseers." His grandfather, deceased about 1657, was, prior to that time, in possession of horses as the aforesaid entry shows. Colonel Joseph Bridger, of Isle of Wight County, owned fourteen horses at the time of his death. These are shown in the inventory of his estate entered, 1686. Thomas Cocke of Henrico County, who died in 1696, disposed of a large estate in his will, including his horses.
The absence of vehicles, except for a coach, a calash and carts, was due perhaps not so much to cost and the necessity for importing them as to the complete lack of passable roads in the Colony. Cartways, which were the worn and widened Indian trails, over which oxen hauled heavy loads, were the open ways over which travel by land could be undertaken. The bodies of the carts were made in the Colony usually and attached to wheels imported from England. Both the pillion and the side-saddle, the latter an item listed in the inventory of Mrs. Elizabeth Digges, 1692, were used by the women in accompanying the men on journeys. A pillion and a pillion cloth were bequeathed in 1652, by Captain John Upton, of Isle of Wight County, to his stepdaughter.
Notwithstanding the almost complete lack of highways, two Virginians are known to have owned vehicles for travel in the seventeenth century. The commission sent over from England to look into conditions which brought about Bacon's Rebellion complained, 1677, that Governor Berkeley had sent them from his plantation "Greenspring" to Jamestown, a distance of three miles, in his coach with the common hangman as a postillion. William Fitzhugh, a well-to-do planter of Stafford County, owned a calash, a sort of a cab imported from England.
Those who did not own horses considered it no hardship to walk miles to their destinations. Even so, the horse eventually became indispensable to Virginians of all classes, who became very skilled riders at an early age. Their adeptness in this as well as their knowledge in breeding, training and handling horses passed from generation to generation until the twentieth century. When the automobile supplanted the family surrey, and the network of hard surfaced highways succeeded to the shady, "woodsy," dirt roads, Virginia horses were retired from their long and noteworthy service to Colony and to State.