The fate of Berkeley Hundred was at the same time the fate of most others of the same sort; and the extinction of the London Company in 1624 ended the granting of patents on that plan.  The owners of the few surviving particular plantations, furthermore, found before long that ownership by groups of absentees was poorly suited to the needs of the case, and that the exercise of public jurisdiction was of more trouble than it was worth.  The particular plantation system proved accordingly but an episode, yet it furnished a transition, which otherwise might not readily have been found, from Virginia the plantation of the London Company, to Virginia the colony of private plantations and farms.  When settlement expanded afresh after the Indians were driven away many private estates gradually arose to follow the industrial routine of those which had been called particular.

The private plantations were hampered in their development by dearth of capital and labor and by the extremely low prices of tobacco which began at the end of the sixteen-twenties as a consequence of overproduction.  But by dint of good management and the diversification of their industry the exceptional men led the way to prosperity and the dignity which it carried.  Of Captain Samuel Matthews, for example, “an old Planter of above thirty years standing,” whose establishment was at Blunt Point on the lower James, it was written in 1648:  “He hath a fine house and all things answerable to it; he sowes yeerly store of hempe and flax, and causes it to be spun; he keeps weavers, and hath a tan-house, causes leather to be dressed, hath eight shoemakers employed in this trade, hath forty negroe servants, brings them up to trades in his house:  he yeerly sowes abundance of wheat, barley, etc.  The wheat he selleth at four shillings the bushell; kills store of beeves, and sells them to victuall the ships when they come thither; hath abundance of kine, a brave dairy, swine great store, and poltery.  He married the daughter of Sir Tho.  Hinton, and in a word, keeps a good house, lives bravely, and a true lover of Virginia.  He is worthy of much honour."[6] Many other planters were thriving more modestly, most of them giving nearly all their attention to the one crop.  The tobacco output was of course increasing prodigiously.  The export from Virginia in 1619 had amounted to twenty thousand pounds; that from Virginia and Maryland in 1664 aggregated fifty thousand hogsheads of about five hundred pounds each.[7]

[Footnote 6:  A Perfect Description of Virginia (London, 1649), reprinted in Peter Force Tracts, vol.  II.]

[Footnote 7:  Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1896), I, 391.]