The Golden Leaf that Built a Port

The Golden Leaf that Built a Port. . Tobacco was currency and the cash crop at the heart of the colonial Virginia economy when Captain Richard Hobbs of the ship Elizabeth and Mary anchored here in the 1660s and received a land patent for 800 acres. Colonel Benjamin Goodrich was paid 10,000 pounds of tobacco for fifty acres of his land to establish the town in 1682. The main street, on your right, called Prince by 1706, was the backbone for access to the earliest businesses and the river front., Imagine townspeople dodging half-ton wooden hogshead barrels of the dried Virginia leaf, thundering down dirt streets to wharves and public warehouses on the river. Enslaved Africans loaded the huge casks onto waiting ships ready to set sail for London, Liverpool and Glasgow. Tobacco became the gold Jamestown settlers had been seeking., Up the street from the wharves thronged crews of foreign sailors to enliven the town, visiting shops or playing a hand of cards at taverns well stocked with a variety of liquors. At the popular Scots Arms Tavern that stood just near here, English plantation owners and Scottish ship captains mingled with merchants, travelers and indentured servants., Although officially designated Tappahannock in 1705, the town was called Hobbs Hole throughout the colonial period. "Hole" meant a deep place in the river where ships could find good anchorage. At times as many as ten vessels lay at anchor in the harbor here and Tappahannock vied with Fredericksburg upriver for a brisk shipping trade that reached its peak on the eve of the American Revolution., (caption) Tobacco Production and Shipping Illustrations by Sydney E. King, courtesy of the National Park Service.