"Incorporations") already
established, yet many would rise as the result of the enterprise,
expenditure, and direction of special ("particular") persons, or groups,
within the Company or having the sanction of it. Such settlements were
known as particular plantations.

Resulting settlements spread east and west along the James and outward
along its rivers and creeks as well. Jamestown lay approximately in the
center of an expanding and growing Colony. It was the center of one of
the four initial Incorporations and it was more. It developed into one
of the original Virginia shires in 1634. This shire, a decade later,
became a county. James City County continues as the oldest governing
unit in English America. Jamestown was its chief seat, Virginia's
capital town and the principal center of the Colony's social and
political life. In size it remained small, yet it was intimately and
directly related to all of the significant developments of Virginia in
the period.

There is strong evidence that Jamestown was the first to feel the impact
of the advantages and fruits that growth produced. Material progress is
evident as early as 1619 in the letter of John Pory, Secretary of the
Colony, written from Virginia late in that year:

Nowe that your lordship may knowe, that we are not the veriest
beggars in the worlde, our cowekeeper here of James citty on
Sunday goes accowtered all in freshe flaming silke; and a wife
of one that in England had professed the black arte, not of a
schollar, but of a collier of Croydon, weares her rought
bever hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken suite
thereto correspondent.

But it is good to remember, perhaps, that Virginia was still not the
perfect paradise. On March 15, 1619 a letter reaching England reported
sad news and very likely not unusual news--"about 300 of the Inhabitants
... died this last yeare."

A NEW APPROACH

In 1618 there were internal changes and dissensions in the Virginia
Company that led to the resignation of Sir Thomas Smith, as Treasurer,
and to the election of Sir Edwin Sandys as his successor. This roughly
corresponded to changes in Company policy toward the administration of
the Colony and to intensified efforts to develop Virginia. It led to the
abolition of martial law, to the establishment of property ownership, to
greater individual freedom and participation in matters of government
and to the intensification of econ