Government of Virginia colony

Through the entire seventeenth and eighteenth hundreds of years Virginia's population—and populated areas—continued to enhance. For the most part, this growth occurred for three factors: the all-natural enhance regarding the current colonial population, immigration, and, into the terms regarding the historian Martha W. Hiden, "the allure of the latest settlements where there is greater window of opportunity for advancement of fortunes." The cigarette economy was also a factor, with planters looking westward for fresh, fertile land after soil depletion became a problem inside Tidewater region. As the population expanded westward, colonists found themselves farther from their county seats, which made court attendance difficult; additional counties were created to satisfy their judicial needs.

Colonists very first broadened into the Northern Neck area, which by 1645 had become Northumberland County. The population in the eastern element of Virginia swelled, and much more counties created as folks decided along the Tidewater rivers, so that by 1702, four of the initial shires and Northumberland County had parented an additional fourteen counties. County development was slow between 1703 and 1730, whenever only seven counties were created: Spotsylvania, King George, Hanover, and Brunswick in 1720; Goochland and Caroline in 1728; and Prince William in 1730. The places of those newly created counties, however, reveal your colonial population ended up being developing on north, northwest, south, and west.

The 1730s in addition saw increased development on west and southwest, as shown by the creation of Orange and Amelia counties in 1734 and Augusta and Frederick counties in 1738. (Augusta County, parent to many more western counties into the eighteenth century, did not establish a county government until 1745, when its population had cultivated big enough to sustain one.) More counties used: Fairfax and Louisa counties in 1742; Albemarle County in 1744; Lunenburg County in 1745; and Chesterfield, Culpeper, Cumberland, and Southampton counties in 1749. By 1750 Virginia contains forty-four counties.

County growth proceeded within the many years before and during the French and Indian War (1754–1763): Halifax and Dinwiddie had been created in 1752; Sussex, Prince Edward, Hampshire, and Bedford in 1753; Loudoun in 1757; Fauquier in 1759; Amherst and Buckingham in 1761; and Charlotte and Mecklenburg in 1764—an additional twelve counties. Based on the Treaty of Paris, finalized in 1763 to get rid of the war, settlement into west of this populated areas was expected to cease, and though county growth slowed down, settlements carried on to maneuver west regardless of the injunction. Pittsylvania County was formed in 1766, Botetourt in 1769, and Dunmore, Berkeley, and Fincastle counties in 1772, taking the total amount of Virginia counties produced in colonial federal government to sixty-one.

Overall, the colonial government in Virginia produced new counties as populations grew adequate to sustain all of them. This is false in North and South Carolina, in which county formation into the west did not hold rate with populace development, ultimately causing corruption in North Carolina and too little courts and law enforcement officials in sc. This, in turn, added towards the Regulator movements of the 1760s, when colonists expanded disillusioned with all the government and rebelled in hope of regulating their particular matters. In Virginia, but residents associated with the Piedmont and also the western an element of the colony were pleased with the price of county development.

In 1770s, as Virginia stood in the limit of independency, the colony had cultivated in population from 350 men and women in 1610 to more than 450, 000, and its own counties extended from Eastern Shore as to what became the state of Kentucky and through the Maryland border towards the vermont edge.