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claimed by bpain or France, all land in America was owned by the king or queen of England. With the new charter, development in Virginia was, in a sense, privatized.
lb induce people to settle in Virginia, the London Company offered 50 acres per settler if they paid their way to Virginia and worked the land for three years. If you paid the way of another settler (purchased a "headright"), you got 50 more acres. Bring over more, you received 50 acre per settler, and thus could build up a large tract of land for yourself. Why the 50-acre rule? In the 1600s, an average family with six children needed at least 25 acres to support themselves, so 50 acres caught people's attention. The government also recommended that plantations be located less than ten miles apart, so settlements could aid each other in case of Indian attacks.
Tobacco turned out to be the major profitable crop, so there was a scramble for prime land, whether contiguous or not. By 1650, the average land grant was for 600 acres. By 1700, a few owners had 30,000 acres each, and some claims were for over 100,000 acres. Land speculators were about as well, making fraudulent deals for "headrights," acquiring land and sitting on it until prices rose. For these reasons, towns never really got a good start in Virginia. It was a race for acreage, with water transportation via rivers, streams, and creeks to move goods in and out. Property owners
96.6%