A history of roads in Virginia: “The Most Convenient Wayes”

Early colonists considered waterways to be the most important transportation links.

The Virginia settlers, who arrived at Jamestown Island aboard three small ships on May 13, 1607, had little need for a road system. Barely more than 100 in number, their first concerns were disease, hunger, shelter, and protection from the often hostile Indians who had lived on the land for generations. In those first rigorous years, survival demanded the full energy of the colonists in the wilderness. The waterways were there for transportation—the great rivers that emptied into the Chesapeake Bay and that were to become known as the James, the York, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac.

As the colonists hunted for food and cautiously began exploring the forest, they discovered a crude network of paths made long before by Indians and wild animals. The colonists used these, and many of the paths were to shape the Virginia road pattern for years to come.

The settlers also found roughly built bridges made of tree trunks and limbs, which they at first believed to be Indian-planted traps rather than bridges. By 1610, with new arrivals from England, the colony numbered 210. The road along the River Bank, probably a former Indian path, was used to haul supplies from the ships to the Jamestown Fort.

The Greate Road appears to have been Jamestown’s main street, and it was of early commercial importance. It crossed the isthmus connecting the island with the mainland at Glass House Point, where in 1608 glass was manufactured for export. Faint traces of the road are evident today at Glass House Point.

Eventually, the Greate Road extended on the mainland to Middle Plantation, a settlement to become known as Williamsburg and destined to be the capital of the Virginia colony and the hub of the colonial road system.

The first bridge recorded as having been built by the English settlers was constructed in 1611 at Jamestown Island. It wasn’t really a bridge, but a wharf about 200 feet long from the bank of the James to the river channel, where the settlers docked their ships. The colony’s first agricultural crops raised for export were rolled to these ships.

John Rolfe had begun experimenting with the cultivation of tobacco in 1612 and two years later exported a shipment to England. In less than 20 years, tobacco exports had reached 500,000 pounds annually; tobacco would remain the foundation for the Virginia economy throughout the colonial period. Inevitably, the success of the tobacco crop was to influence the colony’s transportation needs as well.

The tobacco fields spread on the mainland, and a number of the old Indian paths became tobacco rolling roads. The name came from the practice of packing the harvested tobacco in barrels called hogsheads and rolling them to the wharves, frequently a distance of miles. The rollers ordinarily tried to follow the high ground and avoid the fords, or shallow stream crossings, because water leaking through the barrels would damage the tobacco.

The practice of following the old paths and branching off from time to time on higher ground accounts for many of the early meandering country roads. After two decades, the colony’s population was near 5,000 and growing. The frontier had been pushed well beyond its original boundaries, and while much of the settlers’ travel was still by boat, an increasing proportion was on land.

Next up: America’s First Road Law

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