Colonial Wheat Cultivation
Virginia farmers and planters had long cultivated wheat for domestic consumption, although for much of the colonial period, corn, which could be grown on land used for tobacco and was more easily milled, was the more common grain for both local use and export. Driven by increased European and Caribbean demand after the mid-eighteenth century and a collapse in tobacco prices in the 1760s, more and more Virginia landowners cultivated wheat for export. By the late 1760s, the increased production of wheat was the most dynamic sector of the agricultural economy.
Many large planters cultivated wheat as part of the diversification of tobacco plantations, and wheat was often grown on land previously cleared for tobacco. By the late 1760s, a few innovative large planters had largely abandoned tobacco for wheat, most notably George Washington, who ended tobacco cultivation at Mount Vernon in 1765 and used his enslaved labor force to clear new lands for wheat, although he continued to grow tobacco on other properties south of Fairfax County. In 1770, Washington opened a merchant mill—a large-scale gristmill where grain was ground and packaged for sale—at his Dogue Run Farm on the Mount Vernon estate, which produced flour considered the best in Virginia. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, another large planter, also shifted from tobacco to wheat and constructed mills that allowed him to profit from exporting flour. More frequently, large planters produced wheat in tandem with tobacco, and their control of land and enslaved labor allowed them to produce it at the scale required for profitable export.
Wheat cultivation as part of broader mixed agriculture also provided opportunities during the 1760s for smaller landholders, particularly in the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley. The greatest increase in wheat exports before the Revolutionary War came through the Upper James River naval district, which served the Piedmont.
The earliest significant exports of wheat from Virginia were through the coastwise trade with New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. But it was the growth of markets in Southern Europe and the Caribbean that drove the expansion of wheat cultivation in Virginia. Except for a brief period in the 1740s when all grain exports from the North American colonies had to go through Britain or Ireland, Virginians and other colonists could ship grain directly to these markets. The increase in shipments of wheat from Virginia to New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island in the decade before the Revolutionary War suggests that those colonies, which had much more substantial merchant establishments, were reexporting Virginia grain to these markets. By the late 1760s, as the settlement of the Jamaican interior increased demand for grain to feed enslaved sugar cane workers, Norfolk merchants more than doubled their exports in a single year from 1768 to 1769. As late as 1774, Virginia planters and merchants were shipping flour to Great Britain.
In 1772, acknowledging the increase in the manufacture of flour and the threat of fraud, such as adulterating flour, the General Assembly updated its 1745 inspection process for flour, creating a more exacting process modeled on the colony’s stringent tobacco quality-control process. Millers were required to register a brand that, along with another brand indicating Virginia origin, marked all casks verified by an inspector as containing higher grades of flour. Millers were also prohibited from serving as inspectors.
The expansion of wheat was felt throughout the colony. The newly established merchant mills often became trading centers within local communities. Processed flour also took up a great deal of space and required the construction of larger warehouses and improvements to roads and other forms of transportation. The mills also attracted artisans with technical skills not previously common in the Chesapeake Bay region. The economic and labor diversification growing out of the wheat and flour trade would greatly accelerate after the Revolutionary War.
Wartime Wheat
By the end of the colonial period, the increased production of wheat in Virginia was more than sufficient to meet domestic demand and to serve markets throughout the Atlantic world. With the collapse of the traditional British tobacco trade as a result of the Revolutionary War, many hoped that wheat and flour exports might be the foundation of a thriving, independent commerce in Virginia. But despite efforts to build markets in the Caribbean and Europe, the wheat trade did not thrive during the Revolution due to the British blockade of shipping, the lack of an established mercantile network, and a series of poor harvests. By 1778, wheat and other grains were so scarce that liquor distilling was temporarily prohibited, as was the export of flour and other foodstuffs required for citizens and the Continental Army.
The Continental Army and the state militia were in constant need of flour during the war. In 1778, the Continental Congress directed agents to purchase flour in Virginia, where prices were lower than in the northern states, but poor crops prevented Virginians from meeting the demand, and Continental purchases drove up the prices in the Chesapeake Bay region. The British invasions of Virginia in 1780 and 1781 further disrupted the commercial transportation of wheat and flour. Farmers in the Shenandoah Valley, already important producers of wheat and farther from the areas of military conflict, expanded production. By the final years of the war, they were providing the state militia with upwards of half a million pounds of flour a year. The war-time expansion of wheat cultivation and the construction of new mills in the Shenandoah Valley laid the foundation for the area’s steady growth in the last decades of the eighteenth century. By 1800, the Shenandoah Valley was the leading producer of wheat in the state.
Return of Peace
Despite the economic dislocation of the 1780s, wheat prices in Virginia recovered quickly, and by the 1790s the value of grain exports from the state exceeded tobacco exports, transforming the traditional tobacco-based economy of Virginia. The processing of wheat and flour depended on various skilled artisans, Black and white, and the milling of flour became more technologically advanced through the widespread adoption of automated systems, most notably the one developed by Oliver Evans of Delaware. George Washington upgraded his mill with the Evans system, which mechanized the entire process of flour production from milling to sorting to the packaging of various grades of flour. Wheat farmers also experimented with threshing machines that more efficiently prepared wheat for milling, and the transition to wheat prompted interest in agricultural improvement. Farmers turned to British and French books that had guided an earlier generation of elite plantation owners in diversifying crop production. Virginia wheat producers also became more connected to markets in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland as agents of the Brandywine Valley millers arrived in Alexandria, Fredericksburg, and Richmond, and Baltimore millers became important buyers of Virginia wheat. The increased volume of the flour trade prompted the General Assembly in 1787 and again in 1792 to expand inspection locations for flour and impose new regulations on the quality of flour and casks.The transition to wheat did not reduce planters’ reliance on enslaved labor, which they used for the new crop and associated trades. John Taylor of Caroline, a leading advocate of agricultural reform in early nineteenth-century Virginia, argued that when wheat was grown with other crops and more advanced forms of cultivation, enslavers could ensure work for their enslaved laborers throughout the year. The shift from tobacco to wheat provided many opportunities for Virginia landowners in the early republic, but it did nothing to lessen their commitment to slavery.
