Vernacular Carts & Wagons in 18th century Virginia

 

Three women, one with an infant, are piled upon an overloaded cart. The carter, at the ready, stands near three reluctant horses. A man on horseback and his dog is nearby, either a member of the party, or seeing to their departure. This is set in a rural area, with a structure, trees, and another cart in the background. Thomas Rowlandson’s Migrants (1780) depicts a group of people potentially on the move. Although it was drawn as a scene of Georgian England, it could very well have been Virginia of the Colonial period.

What influenced eighteenth century Virginians in their choice of vehicles? The answer is complex. It is important to first divide vehicles into two categories: those that provided income and those that resulted from income. Travel and transportation in Virginia paralleled that of England. The design and use of vehicles, whether they were instrumental in providing income, or purchased and used because of income, reflected that shared culture. This is illustrated through images of the era throughout this paper. The movement of people to and within Virginia was also driven by factors as nuanced as politics, economy, and geography. As populations shifted, vehicles were adapted to meet the needs of the people, industry, and the land. This was evident in the Valley of Virginia, where the wagon became the dominant mode of cargo transport. However, probate inventories from York County as well as advertisements from The Virginia Gazette from the second half to the last quarter of the eighteenth century show the preference of carts over wagons across the economic spectrum in eastern Virginia. 

 

Rowlandson, Thomas. A Cart Race. 1788. The National Gallery of Art.

                                 

Few historians have delved into the subject of vehicle use and choice. T.H. Breen in The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, writes about how the economy surrounding tobacco helped dictate consumer choices in the Chesapeake. That economy is further explored by Allan Kulikoff in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake. Hal Gill explains in Travel and Transportation that an increase in wealth, as well as governmental sway through taxes drew people to choose certain carriages over others, and the ubiquity of the cart. J. Geraint Jenkins writes in The English Farm Wagon of wheels and the cultural adaptations used in England in the construction of freight conveyances. David Viner in Wagons and Carts provides another perspective and definition. The push westward into the Shenandoah Valley was driven by economics, but the adaptation of wagons was heavily influenced both by geography and the cultures that settled the region. This notion is explored by Warren Hofstra and Karl Raitz with their The Great Valley Road of Virginia; Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present.

(Above)W. H. Pyne. Wheelwrights. Microcosm, 1808. 

             

It would be remiss to discuss eighteenth century vehicles without mention of the wheel. Rather than a lengthy history on a piece of global ancient technology, a focus will remain within the Anglo-American world. Wheels were built traditionally by wheelwrights: specialist woodworkers who also often built the entire vehicle, as well as farm implements. The wheel was comprised of three parts: the hub, or nave, is the center, cylindrical foundation. It was made of a solid piece of elm, a wood chosen for its toughness, that is, its inability to split. The spokes are individual pieces driven into the hub, made of riven or cleft oak, for strength. The felloes, or individual arcs that attach to the spokes to form a rim, were often carved, or bent from ash or beech for strength and lightness. By the eighteenth century, iron was placed around the perimeter in the form of a tyre, or a hoop; or strakes, iron arcs placed over the felloe joints and held by nails. J. Geraint Jenkins, in his work The English Farm Wagon writes:

Before the arrival of the Romans in Britain, the Iron Age inhabitants of the country knew all the techniques of wheelwrighting, techniques that were to remain basically unchanged for the next two thousand years. At this early period, hubs were lathe turned and spokes had square tenons and round tongues which passed through the felloes. The technique of dowelling felloes and fitting two spokes to each, the method of boxing the wheel and shrinking a heated tyre on the felloes, were all well understood by the inhabitants of Western Europe. 

Another feature of spoked wheels is dish: the concave construction of the spokes leaving the hub at angles under ninety degrees, forming a cone. There were many reasons, with many advocates in the eighteenth century for dishing. One was plough wright and cartwright James Small, who in his 1784 A Treatise on Ploughs and Wheeled Carriages explains:

Suppose that a person totally unacquainted with the practice, were employed to make a cart. He would naturally make the axle straight, and their arms without taper. He would set the spokes of the wheels at right angles to the axle, by which means they would also be perpendicular to a level road, and thereby give the most perfect support to the carriage and its load. Such wheels would be flat, and their sole or head would be parallel to the axle. But experience has shown, that such wheels are liable to great inconveniences . 

Small writes of the issues that occur from his scenario: firstly, mud can be caught on the rim and fall onto the hub, thereby falling between the hub and axle, causing tremendous wear. Dishing allows the mud to fall clear of the hub and axle, helping increase the serviceable life. Another is the significant stress laterally from an uneven road surface. “When one of them (the wheel) is lower than the other, either by getting into a rut, or being on the lower side of the road, the greatest part of the load is upon that wheel.”  As he explains, the lower spoke no longer bears the vertical load, and is more apt to collapse the wheel from the inside-out. Jenkins writes of a government influence on wheel and subsequent vehicle construction:

The practice of dishing wheels is not limited to the British Isles, but oddly enough it is far more pronounced in British vehicles than on any others. This may well have been due to legislation; although Parliamentary Acts may not have been prime factors in determining dish, they could well explain the very pronounced dish on some of the older wagon wheels. By an Act of 1773, it was said that no carriage using broad wheels should make a track more than 68 inches wide.

This did not however, apply to the top of the wheel, as Jenkins continues:

The farmers, carriers and wheelwrights overcame this restriction by dishing their wheels very greatly so that they conformed to the legal distance at the bottom but were wide apart at the top. This left room for a capricious body, another argument in support of dish.  

There were detractors to the dish debate; condemnations included that no appreciable stress was placed upon the wheel, and that construction of dished wheels constituted a greater amount of time, thereby eating into profits. A committee convened in the early nineteenth century came to several conclusions based on their observations:

1) That when the wheels are very narrow, then there is little difference in the power required to draw the same load.

2) In conical wheels, the power required to draw the same load is considerable increased by increasing the breadth of wheels and that all the increase of the labour of the cattle is applied to the destruction of the road.

3) On cylindrical wheels, the same power draws the carriage upon smooth roads with equal ease, whether the wheels be broad or narrow, but by the use of such broad wheels, the roads, instead of being destroyed, are consolidated and improved.

4) That great fluctuations take place in the power necessary to draw the same load on conical wheels, according to the circumstances of the wheel bearing the narrow parts of its rim.

5) No such difficulty of resistance happens under the same circumstances with the cylindrical broad wheel.

6) From every circumstance the cylindrical wheel is preferable to the conical in every state of the roads, and in whatever state they may be the cylindrical improves and conical impairs them.

7) As regards the preservation of the roads and labour of the cattle, the cylindrical shape of the wheel is preferable to any other possible shape, it being the only one that has the same velocity at every part of its rim, and that has no dragging or rubbing nor any tendency to grind or derange the materials, nor to leave the surface of the road in a condition to imbibe or to admit water. 

   

 

Above. (Figure 1.) Carrier’s Wagon. 

The battle raged on for more than three centuries with no definitive conclusion. As Virginia was indisputably influenced by England and Parliamentary Acts, and many wheelwrights and vehicle builders emigrated from the British Isles, bringing their common practices to the colony. J. Geraint Jenkins, in his book The English Farm Wagon discusses the evolution of freight vehicles in England: Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Carrier’s or Road wagon (Figure 1.) was a common sight on the highways of England. These massive, four-wheeled transports carried from four to eight tons of freight.  “The old road wagons were well suited for this long distance haulage but their great weight made them unsuitable for transport around the farm,” Jenkins writes.  Carts became the ubiquitous means of conveyance in agricultural settings. David Viner, in Wagons and Carts, describes: 

The two-wheeled cart, on a single axle and drawn by ox, donkey, or a breed of small horse, has been the mainstay of work on the land for centuries. Its size and carrying capacity made it useful for short-distance farm work as well as transport into village or town, and it remained so until the advent of mechanization and the petrol engine. 

Viner further defines the cart:

There are a number of distinct cart types, based as much on functionality as regional variation. Unlike wagons, their story covers the whole of the British Isles, so that local forms can be studied in Wales, on the Isle of Man, across northern England, and in Scotland and Ireland…The basic box construction often had the simple role of transporting dung to the fields, hence the tipping mechanism of some of them. Size again depended upon the demands of the landscape in which a cart worked: heavier for example for bigger loads in open East Anglian countryside than in the narrow lanes of Devon. 

As Jenkins explains, governmental policies created an opposite need:

During the mid-eighteenth century the whole aspect of British agriculture was changing very quickly. Between 1727 and 1760 more than two hundred private Enclosure Acts were passed and enclosed farming became the rule rather than the exception. With this great change in the agricultural economy, better tools and implements were adopted in great quantities and there was a demand for something much larger than carts for harvesting on English farms. 

Both Parliamentary involvement in wheel design and construction and restrictive Acts on agriculture changed wagon design. “English farm wagons of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be divided into two distinct types, the ‘box wagon’ and the ‘bow wagon.’”  Box wagons, according to Jenkins, were regarded as a direct successor of the road wagon of an earlier era, which itself was an English version of the older continental carrier’s wagons and were found primarily in the southeast of England (Figure 1). Bow wagons had wide sideboards that curved over the wheels, with a much shallower body and were used in the southwest of the British Isles. Jenkins asks:

Why is there this peculiar distribution pattern? Why, as far as Britain is concerned, should a wagon be such an important feature in the agricultural life of the English Plain while it is almost completely absent from the farms of Highland Britain? There are five factors, of greater or lesser importance, which may explain this distribution and each factor will be examined in turn and its validity considered. These are: (1) Topographical factors, (2) Economic factors, (3) The size of holdings, (4) Field pattern, (5) Cultural factors. 

The question Jenkins poses and his “five factors” mirror perfectly the preference toward vehicle distribution in eighteenth century Virginia. To explain the topographical factor, it is important to consider the various regions of Virginia; In the east, the Tidewater, populated with flat, marshy areas and many navigable rivers. The Piedmont region, in the central corridor, comprises hilly terrain and pockets of wide-open fields. The Valley, in the west, is a mountainous area with hard, rocky roads. From as early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Virginia had understood the value of a highway system to link farms to eastern cities.  Following the Seven Years War, and through the American Revolution, as populations continued to grow, the scattered farms grew as well, towns eventually developed, taverns and waystations were established. Skilled tradesmen created shops suited for the growing commerce of the Waggon Road: wagon-makers, wheelwrights and blacksmiths began cropping up along major areas along the Road. English, Ulster Scots, Swiss and Germans all migrating into the region borrowed from their individual wagon-building cultures to develop a distinct wagon type: the Newtown Wagon (Figure 2). This wagon was a truly American invention; elements reminiscent of continental European wagons in the body; a hybrid of the developing box and bow-type wagons of England. With a boat-like shape to accommodate large casks on their side, and wheels and undercarriage that were remarkably like English Road wagons. The vehicle was built strong, but light; able to carry three tons of freight, but without the excessive weight to over-burden the four-horse team pulling it.  Compared to its Pennsylvania cousin, the Conestoga wagon, it was significantly lighter; with narrower wheels and undercarriage better suited for the terrain of the Shenandoah Valley. By the middle of the eighteenth century, substantial portions of an established road were built, primarily by enslaved labor, not only linking towns in the Valley, but linking to The Great Philadelphia Road, thereby linking to the world.  

(Figure 2) Newtown Wagon.

  

To understand why western Virginia favored the wagon over the cart, an understanding of the Valley itself must be explored. Early eighteenth-century European settlers in North America had often been thought to have been influenced solely by the environment; the analogy that people, like water, flow in the path of least resistance, that landforms channel people toward certain areas and not others.  Warren Hofstra and Karl Raitz, editors and contributors to the book The Great Valley Road of Virginia argue that it was more complex, that “many factors” contribute to migration: Land markets, economic opportunities, political incentives, diplomatic initiatives, kinship, and friendship-govern movement.  The book does not, however, discount the influence of nature on what they define as “landscape.” In fact, using geological and cultural history, the many contributors to the book attempt to support the claim of the symbiotic relationship of the environment and culture.

The Great Valley spans from the Saint Lawrence Valley in Quebec to the Coosa Valley in Alabama, with various plateaus, rivers and streams creating a natural highway that people from ancient times to the present day have used for commerce, communication, and warfare.  “The Valley is long, expansively open, and has functioned rather like a great aortic thoroughfare, inviting and directing human movement on a grand scale,” Karl Raitz writes in the first chapter, aptly named The Lay of the Land.  In it, Raitz illustrates the point through geological evidence that nature created the means for humans to exploit the land, thereby setting the stage for the editors’ argument.  

Michael N. McConnell, in the second chapter, writes about the first people in the Shenandoah Valley, often called The Great Warrior’s Path by later European explorers and cartographers.  Through investigation of European accounts and archaeological surveys it had been determined that approximately 6,500 years ago, bands of hunter-gatherers followed game into the valley, eventually establishing footpaths.  “The history of native paths through the Valley,” McConnell writes, “is one rooted in motion, not stasis: villages and whole peoples come and go and, as we approach the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that long-standing characteristic of life in the Valley only intensifies.”  With European encroachment and settlement in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries, the area transformed even further, and ownership of the Valley came into question, as The Great Warrior’s Path became The Great Wagon Road. 

The influences of non-Native cultures that ventured into the Valley were not exclusively English, nor exclusively European, but all contributed to the development of the region.  In chapter three, Warren Hofstra states, “On a regional scale, the Valley Road was the key to landscape evolution in the Shenandoah Valley…landscape …embodies -the culture-of its creators.”  Events that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rapidly changed the landscape of the Valley, wars among native peoples dramatically lowered the population, thereby allowing Europeans to ease into areas formerly occupied for centuries.  With land seemingly available, more and more farms were established, eventually growing into plantations of thousands of acres, creating a surplus of goods that needed to be sold. Soon settlements and towns formed, waystations on a major highway, linking southern and northern colonies. 

The Great Valley Road of Virginia sets forth the theory that nature is not an exclusive contributor to human culture. However, from the geologic, geographic, and cultural evidence presented, it does seem to be a major one. The Valley has influenced the flow of people for thousands of years, from the earliest people following food, to the eighteenth and nineteenth century people growing it; from the trading of goods and ideas to its use as a strategic corridor during war. Another substantial contributor was economical; chiefly, the lack of cultivable land in eastern Virginia and central Pennsylvania led people of diverse cultures to settle in the region. 

Jenkins’ “economic factor” relates to industry. In most of British North America that would mean agriculture; and in Virginia specifically, the growing and cultivation of tobacco. In The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, T.H. Breen explores how agriculture heavily influenced the culture of the Chesapeake region:  “Although the topic remains contested, it seems clear that the prosperity and stability of the region resulted from a number of separate factors: the growth of an unfree African labor force, the establishment of a government-controlled system of tobacco warehouses, which carefully monitored the quality of the crops exported to Great Britain and the Continent, and the sale by enterprising Scottish merchants of huge amounts of Chesapeake tobacco on the French market.”   Breen writes:

Tobacco provided  the engine driving this provincial economy. To be sure, during the previous century the price that the American staple fetched on the European market fluctuated wildly, and boom times gave way to depressions so severe that impoverished workers and desperate servants sometimes rose up in rebellion against crown authorities in Virginia. As income from tobacco gradually improved, however, political tranquility replaced chronic unrest. 

The ownership of vehicles was deeply connected to the economics of tobacco, and much like many agricultural products, was dependent upon subjectivity. Rather than actual cash exchanging hands, credit was the driving force in purchasing goods. The profitability of tobacco cultivation increased the use of carts by farmers in the Chesapeake region. Allan Kulikoff in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake writes of the northern Chesapeake:

During the 1730’s, a time of heavy slave imports, slave holders in Prince George’s (Maryland) typically owned only axes and hoes. A third of them owned a plow or cart, and merely a tenth owned both. All the planting, replanting, weeding, harvesting, and marketing of tobacco was done by hand. By the mid-1750’s, nearly all working hands were natives, and planters bought plows, carts, and cartwheels for them to use. Two-thirds of county slaveowners possessed plows or carts, and half owned both, by the 1760’s. 

Those enslaved that demonstrated skill with cart driving were prized for their versatility by larger planters (Figure 3). That dynamic, as Kulikoff argues, changed the social hierarchy of the plantation. “Afro-Americans,” he writes,” who knew that masters could not make a profit without their skilled labor, used plows and carts to establish control over the rhythm and pace of work.”  Enslaved artisans were given more autonomy, and by the 1760’s and 1770’s began to be hired outside of the plantation.  It was not always met with enthusiasm, as Kulikoff explains:

The arrival of carts and plows on tobacco plantations accented the task-oriented work discipline of native slaves. Even during busy seasons, they could relax and work slowly for days and then use the new mechanical implements to complete their work. Landon Carter, for one, regretted introducing plows and carts on his quarters: “Carts and plows only serve to make Overseers and people extremely lazy,” he wrote in 1770, and “wherever they are in great abundance there is the least plantation work done there for both Overseers and Negroes imagine this or that work will be quickly done with the plows and Carts and…are very little solicitous to do their proper parts of the business…till in the end every thing is to do and…must be slubbered and harried over.” 

Yet enslaved workers skillfully manipulated the system of authority. Kulikoff writes, “’Blacks are capable of much labour,’George Washington complained to Arthur Young, ’but having…no ambition to establish a good name, they are too regardless of a bad one; and of course, require more of the master’s eye.’” 

      

(Figure 3) An Enslaved Carter.

        

Williamsburg provided a standard, of which all other communities were compared to in eighteenth century Virginia. Hal Gill, in his Travel and Transportation (1981) writes, “Williamsburg emerges, then, as the site and source of a great deal of activity in the realm of travel and transportation.” he continues, “Produced, purchased, and put to use by all segments of 

society, wheeled vehicles played an important role in the community.”   Gill proceeds to explain, “The term cart was broadly used to describe many kinds of two wheeled work vehicles. The same can be said for the term wagon unless reference is made to a stage wagon (Figure 2, above  ).”   (A stage wagon was a form of long-distance mass-transit for the period; a plain wagon outfitted with bench seats and often a canvas cover over the vehicle.) Using advertisements from The Virginia Gazette, tax records and journals, Gill extrapolated that around sixteen distinct types of vehicles were available within the region of the city.  A major component to cart ownership was price. Gill states that a new cart ranged in price from two to five Pounds Sterling, where a wagon could range from six to ten. Compared to the price to carriages of the period, that fetched from forty-five Pounds for a riding chair, to two-hundred Pounds for a “richly painted” coach.  As a land-locked urban environment, the use and ownership are reflected from across the social and economic spectrum:

Determining the number of carts and wagons in the vicinity is difficult at best. Undoubtedly, they were far more numerous than coaches. Inventories show that both were quite common and that they appear under the ownership of a broad spectrum of Williamsburg residents. For example, the inventory of the estate of James Shields, tavern keeper, includes a wagon and a cart. Peyton Randolph owned two carts and a tumbril (a dumping body cart). Carpenter Matthew Tuell, merchant Henry Hacker and Charles Stagg, actor, and dancing teacher, each owned a cart.  

  (Figure 4) Gig .

        

Carriages were often a luxury item, designed and used chiefly for the transportation of people, primarily those status-seeking individuals in the middle and upper classes. They too could be grouped into axle, or wheel numbers: one axle was often called “Riding Chair,” Gig,” (Figure 4) or “chaise,” the other two axle as “coach,” “phaeton,” or “chariot.” London coachmaker William Felton, in his A Treatise on Carriages in 1795 explains:

For lightness and simplicity two-wheel carriages are preferable, but are less to be depended on for safety; the smallness of their price, and the difference of expence in the imposed duty, are the principal reasons for their being so generally used. They are not so pleasant to ride in as phaetons, as the motion of the carriage frequently gives uneasiness to the passengers, and not having the advantage of the fore wheels. 

 One factor not mentioned in Jenkin’s “factors” is politics. It has been shown that government involvement dramatically influenced how wheels were built in England, which then altered the design of wagons and carts. In Virginia, it altered the consumption of carriages. In 1754 a tax was levied upon carriages to raise funds to protect settlers in the Mississippi regions of Virginia.  As the tax charge was based on the number of wheels, the amount of riding chairs began to outpace the ownership of coaches. A Virginia Gazette article in 1771 states: “…there shall be levied, and paid by the proprietor thereof, to our Sovereign Lord the King, his heirs and successors…a tax or duty of twenty shillings for every coach, chariot, or other four-wheel carriage (except Waggons)and ten shillings for every chair or two-wheel chaise.”  This tax continued through the Revolutionary period, and the trend followed. Hal Gill cites James City County records for 1768-9 and finds that twelve four-wheeled vehicles compared to the sixty-two-wheeled varieties appeared.  Carts and wagons were spared as they provided rather than resulted from income. 

Carts were favored in the east, wagons in the west. There was a clear division based on economy, environment, and culture. Probate Inventories of York County provides another insight into the spectrum of class and vehicle ownership. Former Governor Francis Faquier upon his death in 1771 was reported to have had: “1 Post Chaise and Harness, 1 Shaft Chair and Ditto, 1 Coach and Harness for 2 Horses, and 1 Cart and Do for 3 Ditto.”  What can be gleaned from this inventory? He was a man of means, judging by the number of vehicles owned, and three quarters of them were carriages. Another was the mention of a cart, which by its assessment at five Pounds Sterling was more than likely in excellent condition at the time of his death. Moving further down the socio-economic ladder was the inventory of James Holloway, Junior whose 1767 inventory included: “2 pair Cart Wheels, 1 Cart saddle collar and hames, 2 ox yokes and chain, and 1 ox cart.”   Holloway’s cart was assessed at forty shillings, his wheels at forty-five. The other equipment was related to the harnessing of oxen to the vehicle. Prosperous carpenter James Wray died in 1750 with a sizable estate, to include only one cart.  Advertisements in The Virginia Gazette also display the breadth of vehicle ownership. As per Samuel Long’s death in June of 1775, his estate in Warwick County sold: “A SINGLE CHAIR with Harness, two Carts, a Carrylog, a Timber Carriage (a wagon, see Figure 5) and ten valuable Draught Oxen.”   Along with the “two carts,” Long owned an aptly named carrylog; a specialized cart designed to carry logs (Figure 5). Benjamin Grymes Estate in Fredericksburg in 1772, of “sixteen Hundred Acres” had “several slaves, Waggons, Carts, and Cart Wheels” for sale.  Both gentlemen, hundreds of miles apart, seemed to have been employed in the lucrative industry of timbering. John Armstrong’s estate on the Dan River in south-central Virginia in 1779 has listed “a valuable Waggon and gears for horses.” In Berkley County, 1777, Francis Willis was selling “Three waggons and teams, or the teams without the waggons.”   Philip Vickers Fithian, “Tutor of Nomini Hall” from 1773-74 writes in his Journal of his observations of cart use on Robert Carter’s plantation:

M: Carter has a Cart; & three pair of Oxen which every Day bring in four Loads of Wood, Sunday excepted, & yet these very severe Days we have none to spare; And indeed, I do not wonder, for in the Great House, School House, Kitchen, &c. there are twenty-Eight steady fires!  

The people Went to day as usual into the Woods with the Cart; & Oxen for Wood, as the cold and stormy Weather the several days past has occa- sioned large, & steady fires — It seems however to be - a Breach of the Law of the Sabbath. 

 (Figure 5) Timber Waggons. W. H. Pyne, 1804. 

What can be concluded through the primary sources? Carts were ubiquitous in Virginia, especially in the eastern counties. People across the economic spectrum owned them, some owning many. They were used in specialized circumstances, such as Samuel Long’s carrylog, and for more general-purpose freight hauling as employed by Robert Carter’s enslaved. These carts served as runabouts and were comparable to the modern pick-up truck. Wagons were also mentioned in the source material, yet the function and purpose were more akin to their English cousins in the form of large, heavy farm vehicles. In western Virginia, however, they were analogous to the modern tractor-trailer; designed for large capacity and long-distance hauling, much like the road or carrier’s wagons in England. 

What did influence eighteenth century Virginians in their choice of vehicles? Was the dividing line as clear-cut as east versus west? Urban versus rural? Unfortunately, the best answer is also the worst: it depends. It depends on the factors discussed. It depends on forces beyond human control, and the many that were created. Nature can determine what is grown, where it is grown, and how it will be distributed. It also determines the equipment used by people to perform those tasks. As Small and Jenkins described the development of the wheel in Britain was influenced by physics, the environment, and politics. The dishing debate was a result of generations of observation and experimentation, and when forced by Parliamentary Acts, used as an adaptation to create innovative designs of wagons and carts. J. Geraint Jenkins in The English Farm Wagon writes of the development and distribution of work vehicle throughout the British Isles. Hofstra and Raitz in The Great Valley Road of Virginia show how this was carried over to British North America, where English designs were adapted to the Virginia landscape, as demonstrated in examples such as the Newtown Wagon. That vehicle was also a reflection of the many cultures that blended in the Shenandoah Valley, English, continental European, African, and Indigenous peoples brought influence on the region. Tobacco reigned supreme for much of Virginia’s history, T.H. Breen in The Marketplace of Revolution and Kulikoff in Tobacco and Slaves both discuss the impact, both economically and socially. The use of forced African labor created wealth for many, and with that, experimentation with improvements with cultivation. The effects of an increase in cart use created ripples in the social fabric of colonial Virginia, where skills in driving increased the perceived value of the individual, and the enslaved began to realize it. An increase in wealth also created an increased interest in luxury goods such as carriages. A tax beginning in 1754 influenced the type of carriage owned as shown in The Virginia Gazette. York County probate inventories from the eighteenth century show the material success of free Virginians. The study of vehicles in the eighteenth century is a worthy endeavor and is currently neglected by historians. Yet, it was as much of a reaction to the times as it was a catalyst. 

 

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———. Country Inn. 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/737903.

———. Migrants. 1780. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/347915.

———. Postcart Monks and Women near Church Door. 1791. The Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21771/postcart-monks-and-women-near-church-door.

Small, James. A Treatise on Ploughs and Wheel Carriages. United Kingdom: Author, 1784. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Treatise_on_Ploughs_and_Wheel_Carriage/qFxAAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.

Victoria and Albert Museum. Print-Unknown. 1790. Victoria and Albert-Collections. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69833/print-unknown/.

Viner, David. Wagons and Carts. United Kingdom: Shire Publications, 2008.

White, Brock T. Wagon, Newtown Type. 1920. Photograph. Stewart Bell Jr. Archives, Handley Regional Library. https://handley.pastperfectonline.com/Photo/8D9CAE1E-63E1-4A6A-A3F6-819874824218#gallery.