town development. Jamestown itself was ultimately abandoned to slip un-
der the James’s tidal muds and marshes. West Point became briefly Dele-
ware Town, an experimental settlement named in honor of Thomas West,
Earl de la Warr, a well-regarded early colonial governor. West’s grandson,
John, reputedly the first Englishman born on the York, patented the town,
drew up a long rectangle of plats and streets, and took up residence there.
Deleware Town languished, though, West’s plats apparently never attract-
ing enough buyers. West Point ultimately reverted to John Smith’s perverse
name, and over several human generations it barely survived on its lush
fishery and some, never all, of the trade of its rural hinterland. The town
never claimed but a small portion of the tidewater’s tobacco-exporting
business. In addition to the private shipping docks of great riverfront plant-
ers, there were at least a half-dozen other, similar settlements along the
York and lower Mattaponi and Pamunkey in competition. One, called Brick-
house, stood opposite West Point on the Pamunkey. Also nearby were New-
castle and Cumberland Town. All save Yorktown and West Point were aban-
doned by about . Some, perhaps all, of the vanished settlements had
lost their river landings to siltation, a phenomenon well known through-
out the colonial Chesapeake. Rivers change course without human agency,
but nearly two centuries of tobacco and grain culture, half of that accom-
plished with plows rather than mere hoes, suggests not only considerable
deforestation but exposure of soils to wind and water erosion. The very sym-
biotic commercial coupling of countryside with towns destroyed both, the
towns first, as silt from farms and plantations altered rivers’ courses, iso-
lating many little ports and finally making them disappear.^1
Towns that survived benefited from the general prosperity preceding the
Revolution, and some, not all, turned from wood to brick as their princi-
pal construction material. Tidewater soils are generally sandy, but there
was clay sufficient to bake bricks—that is, once sufficient involuntary labor
was at hand, which was the case well before the middle of the eighteenth
century. Thus significant parts of Revolutionary Yorktown survive today, de-
spite periodic cannonading by Washington’s rebels and, almost a century
later, George McClellan’s grand army. Always a lesser port than Yorktown,
West Point was not quite so permanently built, except for the occasional
church. More brick, pavement, spots of elegance, and the diversity and ani-
mation that defined Jane Jacobs’s great cities awaited the initiative of self-
interested local leadership and some sparkling good luck.^2
Like most towns and cities, West Point depended on its surrounding
agricultural and forested countryside, which sent overland to the port its