this area was carefully surveyed, and lots determined for the stores and warehouses in which imported goods and tobacco for exportation were to be deposited. If the owner of the land appropriated refused to give it up, a jury of twelve men, summoned by the sheriff, were to assess its value, and the amount thus named was to be satisfied by a levy upon every tithable in the county. When the owner of the site of a port had transferred his title to the feoffees, or that title had passed to them by his refusal to make a deed, they were authorized to grant half an acre or mere to any person who should agree to erect on it in the course of four months a house twenty feet square. After October, 1692, all merchandise brought into the Colony and all the products sent out were to pass through one of these ports, and if they were conveyed into or out of the county elsewhere, their forfeiture was to be the penalty.[1]
The support which this measure had in popular favor was shown in the action of many of the leading citizens of the Colony with reference to building a town at York. A plat of ground owned by Benjamin Read was laid off into eighty-five lots, covering an area of fifty acres. Only two appear to have remained without a purchaser. Among the persons who invested in them were such well-known men as Colonel William Digges, John Buckner, Thomas Jefferson, Colonel Edmund Jennings, Colonel William Cole, Dudley Digges, Thomas Chisman, Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., Charles Hansford, Edward Hill, and Governor Francis Nicholson.[2]
It is a fact worthy of note that a number of mechanics purchased lots at York, for the purpose, doubtless, of carrying on their trades in the town. Among them were
