| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xv + 410 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $49.95.
In his thoroughly researched text, Warren R. Hofstra, professor of history at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, focuses the reader's attention upon life in "New Virginia," which was open land in the Shenandoah Valley when the eighteenth century began. At that time, eastern Virginia, which is to say Virginia east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, constituted a largely rural economy focused on tobacco and slave labor. In contrast, the Shenandoah Valley was largely empty of people, because Native Americans had for the most part abandoned the area by the 1650s.	1
By 1800, a century later, the Shenandoah Valley, "the earliest settled region in the Southern backcountry," had become settled private property: surveyed, divided, and subdivided. This had been accomplished through a system of patents and land grants that Native Americans had never anticipated. The valley, in contrast to Tidewater Virginia, became rich in market towns and smaller villages. Colonists taking up newly surveyed tracts in the valley wanted to expand their holdings, while in Tidewater Virginia, where speculator interests played an important role, the population relied on longstanding colonial law and policy and previously surveyed property lines.	2
Hofstra contends that development of the valley underwent three phases in the eighteenth century. The 1730s were a "planting time," when new settlers, encouraged by then-Colonial Governor William Gooch, concentrated on developing three-hundred- to four-hundred-acre plots. Colonists taking up settled tracts usually were eager to expand them. Wheat production changed the landscape. By the 1760s, there was a closer integration of town and country and valley farmers had begun shipping farm products to Great Britain.	. . .

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