* Lesson plan idea - have your students update the information and latest statistics concerning the Tidewater states of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, and the District of Columbia; discuss, contrast and compare the political, economic (employment), and environmental (climate change) situations of the area. • maps
ENGLISH COLONIZATION “may staye the spanische Kinge from flowinge over all the face” of North America, wrote geographer Richard Hakluyt in 1584, when English explorers reached the Carolinas. Yet it was not until May 14, 1607, that colonists founded Jamestown – England's first permanent foothold in the New World – not far from the ruins of a Spanish mission built almost 40 years before. Jamestown lies in the heart of the Tidewater, a unique maritime region and cultural hearth of the nation. The Tidewater centers on Chesapeake Bay, largest of the submerged valleys between Delaware Bay and Pamlico Sound that began filling up as sea levels rose some 10,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.
Experimenting with various crops, Jamestown's pioneers learned tobacco cultivation from the Indians. By 1700 Chesapeake tobacco made up four-fifths of the value of British North America's exports, which by the mid-18th century included lumber and naval stores from North Carolina and rice and indigo from South Carolina.
When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, Virginia, the most populous colony, had more than half a million settlers and Maryland half as many. African slaves, who had begun replacing European indentured laborers in the late 1600s, constituted about a third of the population of these colonies.
After the Revolution, settlement marched westward. In the eastern U.S. the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania – the line surveyed in the 1760s by Mason and Dixon – was the accepted division between the South and the North. But the actual border between the slavery - dependent, plantation South and the antislavery, industrializing North spanned the broad seam of the Tidewater. In 1861 the nation tore apart along that seam. The Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederacy four years and 600,000 lives later.
Immigration and railroads spurred towns in the late 1800s. Two World Wars boosted the economy in the 1900s. Diverse natural resources and farm products were the basis of industries ranging from textiles and cagarettes to chemicals and seafood processing.
Since 1950 economic expansion has been uneven. Many rural counties, especially in the mountainous interior, have lost population, while Tidewater metropolises, such as Washington and Baltimore, have boomed. Describing Chesapeake Bay almost 400 years ago, the English explorer John Smith concluded that “heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.” Now, as the 20th century draws to a close, overdevelopment threatens, and enlightened planning is needed to prevent further deterioraton of Smith's utopia.
1. CA 1500-1650 - FIRST ENCOUNTER - “THE SOILE is strong and lustie ... We intend to plant there (God willing) great plentie of Sugar Canes ... also Orenges, Limons, Almonds, Anniseeds.” Such subtropical crops were unsuitable, but tobacco, first experimented with along the James River in 1512, flourished.
Virginia's pioneers ignored Indian farming practices, although they survived only by acquiring native-grown maize, squash, and beans. Maryland's founders, by contrast, learned willingly from the Indians, and a report claimed that the colony “hath arrived to more in sixe months than Virginia did in as many years.”
By the 1650s the two colonies were yearly exporting almost five million pounds of tobacco.
PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT - Several years after the founding of Jamestown, the Virginia company of London began transferring land to proprietors. Small companies were granted tracts, or hundreds, on which “to erect and build a town.” Headright grants entitled individuals to stake out 50 acres, and in the absence of coordinated surveys, boundary disputes were numerous. Counties, covering from 100 to 450 square miles, imposed administrative order.
ROYAL BEGINNINGS - 1606 Parliament created twin companies – the Virginia companies of Plymouth and of London – as agencies of English colonization of North America. Virginia started out as a London company venture but was converted to a royal colony in 1624; from it Mayland was created in 1632 as a proprietorship under Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore.
2. 1650-1783 - FARMING AND FRONTIERING - “WE HAVE NOT YET FOUND the way of association ourselves in towns,” wrote and observer of the Tidewater at the close of the 1600s. But trade and distribution centers such as Chestertown emerged in the 1700s as tobacco gave way to grain and livestock in parts of the eastern Tidewater.
Pioneers moved inland, planting wheat and corn on the Piedmont in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Scotch-Irish and German settlers flowed south from Pennsylvania on the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. Frederick Town, Winchester, and other market towns sprouted up to serve them. The stream swelled to flood during the French and Indian War in the mid-1700s as migrants ventrued onto the Carolina Piedmont, south of the war zone. Towns like Salem, Salisbury, and Orangeburg are their legacy.
River towns arose near the fall line –the break in slope between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, where tumbling rivers offered waterpower. Baltimore, Alexandria, Richmond, and others prospered as processing centers and head-of-navigation ports for Piedmont wheat, corn, flax, and eventually tobacco.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO BALTIMORE - Baltimore's meteoric rise in the mid-1700s coincided with a huge increase in European demand for wheat. The city was ideally located to tap the granaries of interior Maryland and southern Pennsylvaia. By the Revolution Baltimore was challenging Philadelphia as a grain port and flour-milling center.
TOBACCO AND TOWN BUILDING - Tobacco production discouraged town builing at first. Plantations were self-sufficient, and the Chesapeake's many arms enabled ships to reach individual plantations. After the French market opened up in 1713 and exports increased, “tobacco towns” such as Oxford sprang to life. Legislation requiring tobacco to be inspected at official warehouses stimulated town growth.
INDIANS DISPLACE - By the mid-1700s most Chesapeake Indians had been driven from the region, either by Iroquois tribes from the north or by English pioneers from the east. Some Indians sought refuge in swamps or mountains; others accepted confinement in reservations.
COUNTY SEATS - The English county system was the framework for local government in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. County seats such as Buckingham, Virginia, consisted of little more than a courthouse, jail, or church.
URBAN TRENDS - Almost a century after the founding of Jamestown, no Chesapeake town counted more than 500 residents, despite repeated legislation by the Maryland and Virginia assemblies to promote town building. By the end of the Revolutionalry War some 250 settlements from Maryland to South Carolina still totaled only 100,000 people.
RELIGIOUS AWAKENING - German settlers espoused Lutheranism and various reformed faiths. Scottish immigrants were mainly Presbyterian. Increasing numbers of blacks became Baptists. Maryland was the crucible not only of American Catholicism but also of Methodism, popular after the Revolution. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, evangelical fervor found expression in emotional outdoor revival meetings.
3. 1780-1865 - RIVALRIES AND RUPTURE - ABUNDANDT LAND in the Midwest prompted Virginians, Marylanders, and North Carolinians to go west. kentucky and Tennessee became states in 1792 and 1796. In 1827, two years after the opening of the Erie Canal, the Maryland Assmebly chartered the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Just over a year later, ground was broken in Washington, D.D., for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. By the 1850s the railroad had outraced the canal, reaching Cincinnati and St. Louis.
If binding the East to the interior was difficult, unifying the North and South was impossible. By the summer of 1861 the Deep South states, along with Virginia and North Carolina, had joined the Confederacy. The slave-using state of Maryland sided officially with the Union, as did Delaware, but more than 20,000 Marylanders enlisted in the Confederate Army. A major theater of the Civil War, the Tidewater held two coveted prizes: Richmond, headquarters of the Confederacy, and Washington, symbol of the national unity.
Virginia's mountainous western counties, wedged between the northern states of Pennsylvania and Ohio and chafing under the domination of Tidewater planters, entered the Union as West Virginia in 1863. By then the North's superior railroad network, industrial might, and naval strength had sapped the South. Petersburg, Virginia, fell on April 2, 1865; Richmond was evacuated the same day. On April 9 Robert E. Lee surrended to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
CAPITAL CHOICE - IN 1790 Congress finally agreed on where to locate the capital of U.S. The District of Columbia was one of three choices that inlcuded sites on the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Potomac Rivers. It stood equidistant betwen the North and South and lay on a mavigable river with access to the interior. By 1860 Washington's population had swelled to 75,000.
FREEDOM TRAIN - Coastal swamps from Florida to Virginia offered slaves on the Underground Railroad one avenue of escape; the Appalachian Mountains provided another. Fugitives took many routes out of the Tidewater; from Washington to Baltimore and points north, from Eastern Shore towns to Philadelphia and beyond, and from Cumberland to Uniontown or Bedford in Pennsylvaia.
NEW HARVESTS - Baltimore's oyster-packing industry developed after the B & O Railroad opened up midwestern markets. Meanwhile farmers in the Midwest were outproducing Tidewater and Piedmont grain growers. Tobacco spread into Kentucky, while peanuts and sweet potatoes became important south of Virginia.
FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH - Between 1790 and 1860 the populations of North Carolina and Maryland rose from 383,800 to 992,600 and from 319,700 to 687,000, respectively. The number of Virginians almost doubled from 692,000 to 1,220,000. With almost one-third of Maryland's population in 1860, Baltimore was the only Tidewater city with a substantial iron and steel industry.
TIDEWATER THEATER - In the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July 1861, Confederate Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson stood like a wall against Union troops, earning the nickname “Stonewall.” In September 1862 Gen. Robert E. Lee drove confederate wedge northward into Maryland, but a year later the Union victory at Gettysburg effectively crippled the Confederacy in the East. The Civil War raged also on water: In the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, two ironclads, the Confederacy's Merrimack and the Union's Monitor, ushered in a new era of naval warfare.
4. - 1865-1950 - DIVERSIFIED GROWTH - IN THE LATE 1800s railroads began carrying coal east from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and western Maryland. Newport News and Norfolk soon rivaled Baltimore as coal ports The interior was also rich in lumber; by 1920 most virgin timber had been clear-cut. During World War I, when the U.S. halted imports of chemicals from Germany, the government launched high-explosives production at Nitro in West Virginia's Kanawha Valley.
The North Carolina and Virginia Piedmont offered textile makers waterpower, proximity to the cotton belt, and cheap, plentiful labor. New England manufacturers of hosiery, woolens and synthetics moved to towns such as Sastonia, Burlington, and Danville. Unkike the dispersed textile industry, cigarette manufacturing became havily concentrated in Winston-Salem, Durham, and Richmond.
FURTHER CHANGES ON THE LAND - Wheat farming declined further under competition from the Great Plains. The abolition of slavery made tobacco growing – a labor-intensive occupation – less profitable, and although North Carolina led the nation in production after 1930, the cultivated area continued to shrink. Truck farming gained ground to satisfy the urban appetite for perishable fruits, vegetables, and dairy products.
5. 1950-PRESENT - UNEVEN GROWTH - COMMUTER SUBURBS, planned new towns, office plazas, and shopping malls have spread the urban imprint miles beyond downtowns. Footloose government agencies and high-tech industries have spurred counties north and west of Washington, whose metropolitan population exceeds three million. Metropolitan Baltimore has grown to 2.4 million. Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill – anchors of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park – have expanded; other cities on the Piedmont and Coastal Plain have turned to such diverse industries as the making of apparel, food products, and plastics. Towns heavily dependent on textiles or coal have stagnated.
In a region endowed with mountains, seashores, national parks, and historic sites, tourism is now a mainstay. The Eastern Shore and the coast of North and South Carolina – scenic areas with mild winters – are popular among retirees.
PROTEIN FACTORY WITH A PROBLEM - About ten million people live around Chesapeake Bay described by Baltimore man of letters H. L. Mencken as “an immense protein factory.” The bay, which sustains 2,700 animal species, absorbs huge volumes of sewage, pesticides, and toxic wastes. Silt from cleared watersheds compounds damage.
