in referring to Rolfe's first shipment to England wrote, "So
fragrant was the leaf that it almost at once began to be known as
'sweet-scented.'" Ralph Hamor, in 1614, declared that the colony grew
tobacco equal to that of Trinidad, "sweet and pleasant." Jerome E.
Brooks wrote that Rolfe's importation of tobacco seed resulted in the
famous Virginia sweet-scented leaf.

Once the cultivation began to spread into the areas away from the sandy
loam along the James and York rivers, the type of soil necessary for
the production of the sweet-scented, other varieties began to develop.
In 1688 John Clayton wrote, "I have observed, that that which is called
Pine-wood Land tho' it be a sandy soil, even the sweet-scented Tobacco
that grows thereon, is large and porous, agreeable to Aranoko Tobacco;
it smokes as coursely as Aranoko." While on his visit to Virginia,
Clayton visited a poor, worn-out plantation along the James River. The
owner, a widow, complained to him that her land would produce only four
or five leaves of tobacco per plant. Clayton suggested that one of the
bogs on the plantation be drained and planted in tobacco. A few years
later Clayton happened to meet this same lady in London, selling the
first crop of tobacco grown on the drained bog. She related to Clayton
that the product was "so very large, that it was suspected to be of the
Aranoko kind...."

In 1724 Hugh Jones observed that the farther a person went northward
from the York or southward from the James, the poorer the quality of
the sweet-scented tobacco, "but this maybe (I believe) attributed in
some Measure to the Seed and Management, as well as to the Land and
Latitude." John Custis in a letter to Philip Perry in 1737 wrote that
he grew Oronoco on the Eastern Shore of Virginia using the same seed as
he did for his sweet-scented York crop. It appears that as the sandy
loam necessary for the growing of sweet-scented tobacco became
exhausted and the planters expanded into the heavy fertile soils, the
tobacco became the strong, coarse Oronoco. As virgin soil became
scarce, Oronoco was no longer confined to the richest soils, nor was it
thought to be less sweet-scented than its rivals. Toward the end of the
eighteenth century tobacco inspectors found it so difficult to
distinguish the various types, that they classed all tobacco as
Oronoco. Thus it seems quite possible that both Oronoco and
sweet-scented were originally one variety which became two, primari