In 1789, there were still few conveniences of life in the Neck, or elsewhere in the country. All cloth was woven by hand. Most of the farm implements were made of wood. Wheat was cut with a scythe, raked with a wooden rake and beaten out with sticks or "trodden out" by oxen.
There were as yet no matches with which to make a fire. Flint and tinder box were used instead and live coals were kept as a basis for the next day's fire. Wood was the chief fuel and candles were used for light.
Bananas and oranges were rarely seen in the Northern Neck then, for sailboats were too slow to bring these fruits any distance in good condition. Communication was slow. By 1790 there were fifteen post-offices in Virginia. The postal service was crude. Mails were carried by post-riders and stages.
People of the Northern Neck lived comfortably but the great prosperity was gone, and although eventually it was recovered in part, the pattern of living was never on such a grand scale again as it was before the Revolution. The large estates were broken up by division or sale. New families took the places of the old. Many of the old names passed into oblivion. The old order of social aristocracy declined, but the people still clung to their old customs, traditions and family life.
MANTUA
"Chicacony" was selected as a townsite by the Burgesses some time after John Mottrom and his friends had settled there. Mottrom had built a wharf and a warehouse at Coan and he had plans for a "Brew-House." If he had lived, the town might have matured. But Colonel Mottrom died and the plans for a town seem to have been abandoned. Plantation life did not encourage the growth of towns.
The Coan Hall property passed on to the descendants of John Mottrom. Coan Hall and the other early homes in the vicinity either burned or fell into ruins. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, when the Coan Hall property went out of the Mottrom family, there appears to have been few traces left of the once thriving settlement at Coan.
James Smith, a wealthy Baltimore merchant and shipowner, purchased a portion of the Coan Hall estate from a Mottrom heir and erected a brick mansion on a slope there, about 1785. He called his new home Mantua.
Mantua was built along the traditional lines of a Virginia house—a central hall, two rooms on each side and large end chimneys. From the outside it appeared to have three stories but there were really six floor levels. Later, identical wings were added on each side by Smith's sons. Still later, Smith's grandson added an imposing front portico. Before this addition coaches were driven, tradition says, right up to the front steps and ladies could step from coach to marble steps without soiling their dainty slippers. The conveyance could then continue around to the stables on the west side, or follow the driveway on to Coan Stage Road, which ran back of the plantation.
The marble steps, marble window-sills and paneled inside blinds were handsome details of Mantua which may have been the outcome of Smith's residence in Baltimore. Originally he was a native of County Derry, Ireland.