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Provisioning Tidewater Towns
Provisioning Early American Towns: Research Project Supported by the National
Endowment for the Humanities
by Lorena S. Walsh, Ann Smart Martin, and Joanne Bowen
This material is taken from "Provisioning Early American Towns.
The Chesapeake: A Multidisciplinary Case Study," the final performance report
for the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant RO-22643-93. The report
was written by Lorena S. Walsh, Ann Smart Martin, and Joanne Bowen of the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (1997); further information about the
project is available from Colonial Williamsburg.
This report surveys the preliminary results of an extended interdisciplinary
study of urban provisioning systems in the Chesapeake region in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In providing some
answers to the question, how did townspeople in Virginia and Maryland
supply themselves with food and fuel, it addresses a little-studied
topic of great importance to every urban place, regardless of
its size or primary economic or governmental functions. Wherever,
in the eighteenth century, there were significant concentrations
of people who did not make their living from farming, their provisioning
requirements had a pronounced impact on the surrounding countryside.
This study demonstrates that as few as a hundred such households
was sufficient, in the mid-eighteenth century, to have a noticeable
effect on the productive strategies of farmers in nearby rural
areas. When, by the early nineteenth century, those numbers swelled
into the thousands, the effects of urban markets expanded, sometimes
restructuring the productive strategies of farmers in far distant
hinterlands.
At the same time, town-dwelling families who were largely dependent on food
they did not provide for themselves faced problems of procurement
that hardly ever troubled rural folk. Specialized urban occupations
afforded some townspeople opportunities for advancing individual
and family fortunes in ways seldom available in rural areas. For
more marginal sorts, including widows, single women and free blacks,
who lacked either special skills or the resources and connections
that were increasingly necessary to obtain use rights to, not
to say outright ownership of land, the business of supplying services
to more affluent townspeople afforded a much better chance for
possible advancement, or at least more certain survival, than
did agricultural labor or tenant farming. In a stable or expanding
economy, town dwellers could purchase basic food and fuel with
combined family earnings. In bad times, dependence on others for
the necessities of life put all but elite town-dwellers at a decided
disadvantage. Then, obtaining some form of credit was essential
to avoiding a reduction in the quantity and quality of their diets,
a requirement that not all could meet. The only alternative was
poor relief which was usually restricted to the chronically sick,
disabled, and elderly.
These tensions between rural self-sufficiency and urban dependence had for
hundreds of years played a prominent role in the places from which most
Chesapeake colonists originated. In most of northern Europe, towns
and cities were from the early middle ages a prominent feature
of local societies. Relatively sophisticated urban provisioning
systems were already in evidence by the 1300s, and the rulers
of emerging European states devoted considerable attention to
the problems of ensuring an adequate urban food supply, if for
no other reason than to contain town unrest should shortages arise.
Differential meat and grain provisioning systems likely developed
at about this time in Europe. Grain and meat were often supplied
by different sets of producers and distributed through separate
marketing networks. Moreover the meats that various economic and social
groups consumed often came from different sorts of suppliers and
distributors. Affluent town dwellers doubtless always found ways to ensure
adequate supplies of fresh meats, but the poorer sorts had to depend on local
butchers who presumably sold small amounts only for ready cash, or else
they had to obtain whatever protein they consumed primarily from
alternative sources to fresh meats such as milk, cheese, preserved
meat, and shellfish. Distinct meat and grain distribution networks
were common in eighteenth-century Europe, but, until this study,
with the exception of Bowen’s findings for eighteenth-century
Connecticut, differential food distribution networks have not
been identified as a common pattern in the American colonies.
Moreover, in England, an in other parts of northern Europe, urban populations
increased dramatically in the 1500s and 1600s, and farmers living
within the reach of these expanding markets had begun to restructure
their activities accordingly. Many forced African immigrants,
in contrast, came from overwhelmingly rural economies, but even
in such regions, frequent local and regional provision markets
were a regular feature of rural life. Moreover, some had been
transported from areas where sizeable towns and cities posed similar
problems and opportunities.
Once they arrived in the Chesapeake, many white colonists revised their
expectations. An abundance of apparently unclaimed land promoted
a desire among most to become independent landowners. Local topography
and natural resources encouraged diffuse rather than concentrated
settlement. The initial absence of towns and of significant numbers
of people earning their living by anything other than agriculture
discouraged any reliance on producing foods or other products
for local domestic markets. Finally the unparalleled opportunities
that emerged for getting ahead by concentrating on the production
of tobacco for European markets soon locked almost everyone into
an export centered staple economy. Enslaved Africans were soon
denied any chance for eventual freedom, as well as ownership of
substantial property such as livestock or guns. However slaves
residing within traveling distance of town markets made the most
of opportunities to better their lives by producing or gathering
petty perishable produce, a traffic widely tolerated in practice,
if not always entirely sanctioned by law.
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