For want of Towns, Markets, and Money, there is but little Encouragement for Tradesmen and Artificers, and therefore little Choice of them, and their Labour very dear in the Country. A Tradesman having no Opportunity of a Market where he can buy Meat, Milk, Corn, and all other things, must either make Corn, keep Cows, and raise Stocks himself, or must ride about the Country to buy Meat and Corn where he can find it; and then is puzzled to find Carriers, Drovers, Butchers, Salting (for he can’t buy one Joynt or two) and a great many other Things, which there would be no Occasion for, if there were Towns and Markets. Then a great deal of the Tradesman’s Time being necessarily spent in going and coming to and from his Work, in dispers’d Country Plantations, and his Pay being generally in straggling Parcels of Tobacco, the Collection whereof costs about 10 per Cent. and the best of this Pay coming but once a Year, so that he cannot turn his Hand frequently with a small Stock, as Tradesmen do in England and elsewhere, all this occasions the Dearth of all Tradesmen’s Labour, and likewise the Discouragement, Scarcity, and Insufficiency of Tradesmen. When James Blair and his co-authors wrote of the difficulties faced by artificers, Williamsburg was about to be made the capital of the Virginia colony. Seventy years later Williamsburg was enjoying the height of its golden age—but the soil continued less than fertile for the growth of large-scale and urban iron workshops. Governor Fauquier reported to the board of Trade in 1766: There is but one manufactory of the least importance carried on in this Colony, which is, the making of Iron both in pigs and barrs, which receives no publick encouragement, and which when made is chiefly exported to Great Britain. But ... every gentleman of much property in land and negroes have some of their own negroes bred up in the trade of blacksmiths, and make axes, hoes, ploughshares, and such kind of coarse work for the use of their plantations. I do not know that there is a white-smith or maker of cutlery in the Colony. Fauquier’s report may be discounted as a politically motivated effort to allay the home government’s suspicions that the colonists were engaging too heavily in iron manufacture. As a matter of fact, there was a whitesmith (that is, tinsmith or worker in white metal) by the name of John Bell in Williamsburg at the time Fauquier wrote. Records of the period mention cutlers at work in Williamsburg and elsewhere in the colony. But the point of paramount significance in his report lies in the undeniable fact that agricultural blacksmithing—and Virginia was an almost entirely agricultural colony—took place on the individual plantations. In addition to Negro slaves, some indentured servants, free journeymen, and master craftsmen—the latter occasionally itinerant—could be found working at their craft on farms throughout the colony.