This then was the Virginia of 1625—a settled area embracing the James River basin and the lower part of the Eastern Shore. It was very rural with the people busy about the task of developing a new land. Some twenty-seven distinct communities, groups, or settlements were enumerated at this time, yet even these may not fully suggest the scope of the occupied, or cultivated, land. These settlements were chiefly along the north and south shores of the James River, eastward from the falls to the Chesapeake Bay. Though loosely knit geographically, they were a unit politically with affairs, for the most part, administered from the capital "citty" of Jamestown. Actually the Colony even now was poised for an extension of its frontier inland from the river fringe especially across to the banks of the York and into what was to become the Norfolk area. This would precede "the push to the west" that later became such a familiar pattern.
In the first seventeen years, despite hardship, suffering, death, discouragement and defeats, a great deal had been accomplished in Virginia. The colonists, some of whom had already become "ancient planters," had met and learned many of the ways of the wilderness and the new environment. They had learned to survive and had gained knowledge of the country's advantages and disadvantages and its nature and extent. After many false starts, a source of wealth had been found in tobacco. Security was coming to replace insecurity and individual well-being was rising above the earlier general storehouse or magazine system. Government, too, after several changes of direction, had become stable and even embraced a representative legislative assembly. It seems that King James I, when he took over, directly, the management of the Colony, must have found that the Virginia Company of London had built well in the New World. Otherwise, the change of administration would have been more disrupting than it was in Virginia.
[SELECTED READINGS]
Andrews, Charles M., The Colonial Period of American History: The Settlements I. New Haven, c.1934 (several printings).
Andrews, Matthew Page, Virginia: The Old Dominion. New York, c.1937.
Brown, Alexander, The First Republic in America. Boston, 1898.
Brown, Alexander (ed.), The Genesis of the United States.... Boston, 1896. 2 volumes.
Chandler, J. A. C., and Thames, T. B., Colonial Virginia. Richmond, 1907.