| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | 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. xviii, 410 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7418-1.)

As its title suggests, this study offers a remarkable dual focus, concentrating as much on the imperial project of "plantation" as on the more familiar matter of settlers and the landscapes they created. Imperial vision, circa 1720, first called for Shenandoah settlement to insulate Virginia from transmontane threats: "Peopling an Empire" (chapter 2) begat "Settling the Shenandoah" (chapter 3). Imperial needs called for "Bounding the Land" (chapter 4), creating Frederick County in 1743, "centered" on a new town (the future Winchester), which did not immediately supplant already wide-ranging countryside networks of exchange (p. 180). But imperial conflict soon brought an influx of cash-rich, market-attracting military trade to Winchester, and from then on old exchange and new market economies increasingly intertwined, centering on the flourishing town. By the time the "imperial story" (p. 56) per se ended, the Shenandoah Valley, with its "vibrant grain economy" (p. 334), was embarked on an empire-sized commercial economy of production and consumption. By 1800, the mature Shenandoah "town and country" system had brought Winchester into full Georgian flower and generated a hierarchy of new towns supporting and participating in trade, ranging from the trans-Appalachian West across the entire Atlantic world.

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