164	Perspectives in American History

Without major centers almost to the eve of the Revolution, Vir-
ginia and Maryland were not without town life. The maps arc
filled with places that contemporaries considered towns. If most of
the county seats (or "Court Houses") in Virginia were little more
than hamlets, there were somewhat more substantial commercial
towns at the mouths of rivers (Norfolk and Yorktown) and more
characteristically at the limits of navigation of the principal rivers:
Alexandria on the Potomac (population 2,748 in 1790), Fredericks-
burg on the Rappahannock (1,485 in 1790), Richmond on the
James (under 2,000 in 1775), and Petersburg on the Appomattox
(2,828 in 1790 but the most important tobacco shipping center), as
well as Georgetown in Maryland. There were also even smaller
but fairly busy little port towns along the rivers that handled local
traffic and ships that could not or did not wish to venture up to the
"heads" of navigation: Port Tobacco in Maryland, Dumfries on
the Virginia side of the Potomac, Hobbs Hole on the Rappahan-
nock. Busy or not, none of this latter group attracted very much of
a population.

The failure of Virginia and Maryland to develop any l.irgf cnrn».
nJerciaLcenters betore 1775 (or even any middling centers before
OJ/.SQ) has long perplexed historians and geographers. Moreover, it
perplexed the people and leaders of the two colonies themselves in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, royal policy
favored town growth, and the legislatures of the two colonies passed
numerous acts intended to encourage town growth, but all to very
little effect.

The most comnT">n ^q'hT^ion for the lack of towns in the
Chesapeake has beerfgeographicalSAccording to this explanation,
towns did not develop!!! ViigiitJa and Maryland because the area
was so well endowed with waterways, the great Bay of Chesapeake
itself, two hundred miles long, with the many rivers that flow into
it. great and small, and the numerous tributaries ot those rivers.
Ships could come from Britain or other colonies and deliver goods
and pick up tobacco at the wharf ot the individual planter or coun-
try storekeeper. There wras thus no need for a compulsory point of
transshipment as at Philadelphia where wholesale dealers and greater