170	Perspectives in American History

this activity, Norfolk attracted a certain amount of the surplus
provisions, etc., from elsewhere in Virginia though all the major
rivers and havens of Virginia and Maryland continued to have their
own West Indian trade, and New Englanders continued to bring
West Indian produce into the Bay. Similarly, when traders else-
where in the Bay were short of sugar, molasses, and rum, they
knew they could always order some_from Norfolk, where there
were large distilleries.76 Norfolk also became a major exporter of
Virginia wheat to southern Europe though other districts also did
their own wheat exporting.77 The one thing that Norfolk did not
handle very much of was tobacco.78 With the surplus earnings of
its sales to the West Indies, Norfolk imported manufactured goods
from Britain, most of which were sold in its natural hinterland in
southeast Virginia and adjacent North Carolina, but some of which
re also sold elsewhere in Virginia.

/ In. short, the not very impressive trade of Norfolk to the West   N
Indies and soudiern Europe made possible a larger town than the ~   \

'mumtely more valuable tobacco export trade of the rest of Vir-
ginia did. Norfolk's size was consistent with that of other towns

"specializing in the West Indian trade, e.g., Providence, NewLon-
, New Haven. To be active in its trades, Norfolk had to be a
laller-scale Philadelphia, a city of mariners, shipwrights, small
icrchants, butchers, tanners, and shopkeepers.
The case of Baltimore is even clearer. Baltimore sits on a minor
branch of the Patapsco River, one ot the less important rivers flow-
ing into the Chesapeake Bay, about two hundred miles north of
Norfolk, and at the extreme northern limits of the tobacco pro-

jjucino; zone. Nearby, on the main branch of the Patapsco River,
was the hamlet of Elk Ridge where there was a public tobacco in-
spection warehouse—as there was at Balitmore. Elk Ridge tobacco

76. Thomas J. Wettcnbaker, Norfolk Historic Southern Port, ed. Marvin W. Schlegel,
2d ed. (Durham, N.C., 1962), pp. 1-47.

77. PRO Customs 16/1.

78. Ibid.; for the years 1745-1756, see Edward D. Neill, Hie Fairfaxes of England and
America (Albany, 1868), p. 225. Tobacco shipments from the Norfolk district may have
risen significantly in the early 1770'$, but still remained much less than that of any of the
tobacco-producing districts.