Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/498

 of the mountains, which in a more recent age has become the seat of wine manufacture in the State, and which in the future may develop into the greatest wine-producing district in the Western Hemisphere, after California.

An account of the agricultural interests of Virginia in the closing decade of the seventeenth century would not be complete without some reference to its live stock at that time. In the course of this important period, there is observed a growing desire among the people of Virginia to improve the breed of their horses. It is remarkable that this feeling had not been exhibited at a still earlier date in the older communities of the Colony, since for fifty years previous to 1686, when the Assembly of Virginia enacted its most carefully considered law for the improvement of the strain of these animals, much interest had been shown in England in the same subject. Before 1660, a number of Arab, Barb, and Turkish stallions had been imported into the mother country for the purpose of producing a fine type of horse, both for the saddle and for the turf, and several standard books on the subject had been written. Charles the Second had bought the four foreign mares which are generally regarded as the beginning of the breed of English thoroughbreds, and his successor had encouraged the introduction of Eastern blood. A number of planters in the Colony, who had emigrated from England after reaching the age of manhood, must have acquired in their early associations a great fondness for the excitement of the turf as well as cultivated a love of the animal for itself. In the inventory of the live stock of Virginia in 1649, it was stated, as has been seen, that many of the horses and mares to be found there at that time were of excellent blood, and this does not seem to be at all improbable.

The decline in the physical character of the Virginian