230

ESSAYS IN COLONIAL HISTORY

a private road from Queenstown up the river.1* In Balti-
more County by 1737 the roads had been pushed up as far
as Peach Bottom on the Susquehauna, and possibly con-
nected on up to the settlements in Pennsylvania." Thus
within the span of forty years a large population had
penetrated far into the interior to the north and west of
the upper Chesapeake.

Some of the tide-water people who went into this ter-
ritory carried their tobacco culture with them.15 Never-
theless, tobacco was not a suitable staple for this expan-
sion. Its transportation is so difficult and injurious that
this alone would have served to limit the inland extension
of the crop.1" Even transportation by water was objec-
tionable to the planters." But if the transportation prob-
lem alone was not sufficient to turn the new settlers of
the piedmont region away from the old staple, conditions
in the tobacco trade strongly tended toward that result.
During the early years of the German immigration to-
bacco was so cheap that it scarcely paid the cost of pro-
duction. The crop reached such a low ebb of prosperity
that in 1748 the colony was forced in sheer desperation to
adopt what was considered a most drastic inspection act.
Though some relief came through this law, the crop con-
tinued to be only moderately profitable.18 Grain, on the

iť Upper House Journal, April 22, 29, 1736, in Md. Arch., XXXIX, 408,
483.

14 Baltimore County Court Records, appointments of overseers for the
roads.

"Frederick County Records. The Inventories and Administration Ac-
counts often enumerate the crops on the land of the deceased.

is Gould, Money and Transportation in Maryland, 1715-1765, pp. 142,
143 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, Ser. XXXIII, No. 1).

i' A notice in the Maryland Gazette, Feb. 10, 1774, says that the ship
Annapolis will be moved from Annapolis to the Patuxent Eiver "in order to
remove the apprehensions they [the Patuxent River shippers] seemed to
have, of too long a water carriage for their tobacco in small craft,"

is N. D. Mereness, Maryland as a Proprietary Province, p. 116.

THE RISE OF BALTIMORE

231

other hand, had just the qualities that tobacco lacked. The
methods of its culture were well known to all the new
settlers, and its transportation by either land or water
was not difficult. But above all else, this was the period
when grain was in the ascendency. The West Indies,
southern Europe, Ireland, and even England were begin-
ning to look to America for food. Consequently, in all the
American cities, demand for grain was strong and prices
were high. About 1750, two or three years after the enact-
ment of the inspection law, a hundred pounds of tobacco
was worth four or five bushels of wheat. To-day (1929) a
hundred pounds of Maryland leaf is worth from twenty
to thirty bushels of wheat. The high value of wheat as
compared with tobacco in 1750 is obvious. It is not sur-
prising, therefore, that all records attest the fact that
wheat and corn were the staple crops of the western
country.19

Thus it appears that between 1720 and 1750 there de-
veloped a region in Western Maryland and adjacent
parts of Pennsylvania that did not possess any of the
conditions that had hitherto prevented an urban economy.
But little grain could yet be marketed in England; and
the "farmer," or grain grower, would find it difficult to
deal with a captain of a ship who could not return with
English goods. A complicated system of exchanges was
necessary before the value of the grain sold could be
transformed into the diversified manufactures needed.
A merchant was required to conduct these exchanges,
and wherever cereals became the principal crop a mer-
cantile class had to develop.

The dispersion of population over the west would have
produced the same result even if grain had not become

is Eddis, Letters from America, p. 130; Frederick County Records, pas-
trim. The inventories especially show the normal crop pattern to consist of
wheat, corn, and an occasional field of hemp, flax, or tobacco.