The trade of Virginia was become so extensive that Dutch as well as English ships sought the colony.  The principal settlements were on the north side of James River, and as the voyager in 1634 sailed from Chesapeake Bay he passed first the new fort at Point Comfort lately constructed by Captain Samuel Matthews.  About five miles farther on was Newport News, chiefly remarkable for its spring, where all the ships stopped to take in water, at this time the residence of Captain Daniel Gookin, a prominent Puritan, who afterwards removed to Massachusetts.  Five miles above Newport News, at Deep Creek, was Denbeigh, Captain Samuel Matthews’s place, a miniature village rather than plantation, where many servants were employed, hemp and flax woven, hides tanned, leather made into shoes, cattle and swine raised for the ships outward bound, and a large dairy and numerous poultry kept.

A few hours’ sail from Denbeigh was Littletown, the residence of George Menifie.  He had a garden of two acres on the river-side, which was full of roses of Provence, apple, pear, and cherry trees, and the various fruits of Holland, with different kinds of sweet-smelling herbs, such as rosemary, sage, marjoram, and thyme.  Growing around the house was an orchard of peach-trees, which astonished his visitors very much, for they were not to be seen anywhere else on the coast.[5]

About six miles farther was Jamestown, a village of three hundred inhabitants, built upon two streets at the upper end of the island.  There the governor resided with some of his council, one of whom, Captain William Pierce, had a garden of three or four acres, from which his wife a few years before obtained a hundred bushels of figs.[6] The houses there as elsewhere were of wood, with brick chimneys, but architecture was improving.

In 1637 the General Assembly offered a lot to every person who should build a house at Jamestown Island; and in pursuance of the encouragement given, “twelve new houses and stores were built in the town,” one of brick by Richard Kempe, “the fairest ever known in this country for substance and uniformity.”  About the same time money was raised for a brick church and a brick state-house.[7] As to the general condition of the colony in 1634, Captain Thomas Young reported that there was not only a “very great plentie of milk, cheese, and butter, but of corn, which latter almost every planter in the colony hath."[8]

Such a “plentie of corn” must be contrasted with the scarcity in 1630, for the current of prosperity did not run altogether smoothly.  The mortality still continued frightful, and “during the months of June, July, and August, the people died like cats and dogs,"[9] a statement especially true of the servants, of whom hardly one in five survived the first year’s hardships in the malarial tobacco-fields along the creeks and rivers.[10] In 1630 tobacco tumbled from its high price of 3s. 6d. to 1d. per pound, and the colony was much “perplexed” for want of money to buy corn, which they had neglected to raise.  To relieve the distress, Harvey, the next year, sent several ships to trade with the Indians up Chesapeake Bay and on the coast as far south as Cape Fear.[11]