The sands are most excellent in character for building purposes and can be found any and everywhere, and when contiguous to railroads, have, in considerable quantities, been shipped to the cities for the making of concrete blocks, a most excellent building material. The clays can be found in very many places, of the very best kind for the manufacture of tile and brick, as shown by the stability of many old brick houses over a hundred years old in all parts of the county now standing whose bricks were made of clay found in their immediate vicinities, and that not manufactured in the best manner.

     The marls can be found everywhere throughout the county along its many swamps and ravines in inexhaustible quantities. The deposits of this valuable mineral are of two kinds, red and blue, the former mixed with clay and often so rich in lime as to be nearly white, found in hundreds of places along the rivers, creeks and swamps, often forming great high hills of unlimited quantities and easy to obtain.

     The blue marl can be found everywhere beyond tidewater in immense quantities. Although harder to obtain than the red variety, it has a greater fertilizing quality for land on account of the greater admixture of vegetable matter. It is, in fact, a semi-peat. A successful application of either of these marls work a wonderful change in the productiveness of the land.

     The American Cement Company has recognized the value of the marls of the county and has purchased hundreds of acres of land upon which are deposits, and some day, not far distant, gangs of men, with steam shovels and other appliances, will be tearing down these hills and conveying them away to be calcined into hydraulic cement.

     The colonists of this county early commenced boat-building, to encourage which art the General Assembly enacted laws giving "rewards" of money to those persons who should build vessels of twenty tons burden and over.

     The object of the General Assembly was to render the people quickly and thoroughly independent of the mother country, whose navigation laws required at first everything to be shipped in British bottoms or vessels owned by the shippers. That the colonists must have gone to work early at this business is evidenced by the following extracts from old records:

"In 1663 the General Assembly rewarded John Pitt, of Isle of Wight county, for building a vessel of twenty-three tons."

In 1680 the appraisement of Col. Bridger's estate mentions a sloop that will carry twenty-eight tons."

"In 1686, Thomas Godwin, by will, leaves to his wife three horses and her proportion of a sloop not yet appraised." And many other wills of like tenor are recorded, showing that many of the residents of this county owned their own vessels."

     After 1611, when Lord Delaware came up the river with three ships laden with farming implements, horses, cows, hogs, and one thousand emigrants, we hear no more of "starving times." He met the sixty desperate, famishing men who had abandoned Jamestown, in the morning moved down the river as far as Burwells Bay, spent the night there waiting for a change of tide to assist them in the propulsion of their heavy, unsafe boats. Thus the abandonment of the colony was fortuitously saved by the intervention of "two tides"; the flood which brought Lord Delaware as far as Newport news and compelled the disheartened colonists to stop at Warrosquoyacke (Burwells) Bay.

     After the great massacre, March 22nd, 1622, the colonists did not remain more than nine months from their farms, and on their return took possession of all the open lands of the Indians, and, we can well imagine, went to work with a zest to retrieve their ruined fortunes.

     For one hundred years the principal crop was tobacco, which, at first, brought immense prices and was easily converted into money and other commodities in England. But the increase in the use of tobacco did not keep pace with the production in the virgin soil of the State, and the price, ever fluctuating, continued to fall until far below the costs of production. This brought about a most distressing state of affairs, entailing not only poverty, and, in many cases, ruin upon the planters, but as well upon all classes of society, and even almost blocking the machinery of government, for the salaries of the ministers, doctors, lawyers and clerks were paid in tobacco or its equivalent, and this was often hard to determine and the keeping of the accounts of the merchants and government officials, based on tobacco, was most uncertain, unsatisfactory and annoying. Many expedients were adopted at various times to limit the acreage in tobacco, the cultivation of "seconds" (suckers which came after the crop was cut) being prohibited and the adoption of a minimum price, etc. But they all failed, and this county early turned its attention to the cultivation of other crops, partly induced by its large water front, affording easy transportation, enabling the inhabitants to cultivate such bulky crops as corn and wheat.