Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/17

Rh like Pennsylvania and New York—was settled by working farmers of the average type whose handholdingslandholdings [sic] were not extensive. The system of great plantations was a later development. Economic conditions changed the character of early rural Virginia, just as another set of economic conditions at a much later time changed the character of rural New England.

The studies of Professor Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, as he has summed them up in his recent work on the Planters of Colonial Virginia, show us that a hundred years after the settlement of Jamestown the average Virginia farmer was a man who held somewhere from one hundred to two hundred acres of land, while in various counties there were not more than one or two families that owned as much as a thousand acres. Bur, during the second hundred years, lands had become depleted, ordinary farming had failed, and the large planter using slave labor had bought up numerous old farms and had framed a new system on the wreckage of the old. It is a matter of the highest interest and importance that Professor Wertenbaker has been able to recover from the British archives, and to publish for our benefit, the actual lists if Virginia's landowners with their respective holdings, county by county, for a great part of Virginia as of a date a little more than two hundred years ago.

These lists, taken in conjunction with available records of land transfers, shed a light that is not merely curious but is of fundamental importance upon the beginning of your great neighboring State. It is instructive to compare the list of names of landholders thus presented with the lists of family names disclosed by our first national census―that of 1790. It will soon be 840 years since William the Conqueror made his great survey of the lands of England, and listed their feudal overlords and their tenants and occupiers. These records of Domesday Book are an invaluable source of English history; and it is only to be regretted that an even more complete record might not have been made century by century down to the present time.

The State of Wisconsin, with a fine sense of its dignity as a commonwealth and of the future importance of its historical records, is now engaged in a notable inquiry, directed by the State Historical Society, known as the Wisconsin Domesday.