Program Information

In a burst of entrepreneurial creativity, the Virginia Company, founder of the Jamestown colony, tried again and again and again to make the colony a commercial success. "Jamestown: A Fruitful Soil" provides a historical overview of the people and events of 17th-century Virginia.

Transcript

In a burst of entrepreneurial creativity, the Virginia Company, founder of the Jamestown colony, tried again and again and again to make the colony a commercial success.

I’m Steve Clark with Jamestown: A Fruitful Soil, a celebration of Virginia’s Quadricentennial sponsored by Jamestown Settlement, a living history museum in the Williamsburg area of Virginia.

“The country it selfe is large and great…the land is full of milneralles, plenty of woods …the soile is strong and lustie of its owne nature.” Thus, with great optimism, wrote the Virginia Company of its New World commercial venture on the James River.

One of the primary goals of the company was to create a source of valuable raw materials and manufactured goods that could help England become more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign sources for these commodities. The Virginia Company tried just about everything to find a type of product to make Jamestown a success.

It became clear that gold and silver, found in such abundance in Spanish America, were not available in Virginia. The company then began an aggressive search for marketable commodities that would insure the colony’s profitability. Wood was abundant, but the cost of transporting wood products home was prohibitive. They brought in Polish and German craftsmen to produce glass, potash, tar and pitch, Italian glassmakers to make trade beads, and French immigrants to produce silk and wine. Iron, perfumes, medicines, dyes, hemp, flax, salt, the list went on and on. Nothing seemed to work.

Only the fur trade became profitable, and then only later. The earnings at first were too small to offset losses elsewhere. For seven years the company experimented with saleable products, but not until John Rolfe successfully cultivated light, aromatic Caribbean tobacco did the colony find its golden weed and its economic deliverance.

To learn more visit history is fun dot org.

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