en barrels of corn. Around 1775 one
man produced from 2,000 to 2,500 pounds of tobacco besides provisions.
Thus it appears that during most of the Colonial period one man could
cultivate one and a half to two acres of tobacco, plus provisions; but
by the end of this period he had increased the productiveness of his
own labor.

MANAGEMENT OF THE CROP

Cultivation practices during the early years at Jamestown appear to
have been a combination of those used by the Indians and those of the
farmers in England; modifications and new techniques were developed as
the settlers became experienced planters. The early Jamestown settlers
followed the Indian custom of planting the tobacco seed in hills as
they did corn, although some probably followed the practice as
described by Stevens and Liebault's _Maison Rustique_ or _The Country
Farm_, published in London in 1606:

For to sow it, you must make a hole in the earth with your finger
and that as deep as your finger is long, then you must cast into
the same hole ten or twelve seeds of the said Nicotiana together,
and fill up the hole again: for it is so small, as that if you
should put in but four or five seeds the earth would choake it: and
if the time be dry, you must water the place easily some five days
after: And when the herb is grown out of the earth, inasmuch as
every seed will have put up his sprout and stalk, and that the
small thready roots are entangled the one within the other, you
must with a great knife make a composs within the earth in the
places about this plot where they grow and take up the earth and
all together, and cast them into a bucket full of water, to the end
that the earth may be separated, and the small and tender impes
swim about the water; and so you shall sunder them one after
another without breaking them.

This was perhaps the forerunner of the tobacco plantbed, as it appears
from the above description that a half dozen or so plants were taken
from each hill sown and transplanted nearby.

Just when the planters stopped planting tobacco like corn is not known.
Thomas Glover's _Account of Virginia_, written in 1671, is perhaps the
first written account which mentions sowing the seeds in beds. He
wrote, "In the Twelve-daies [before Christmas?] they begin to sow their
seed in the beds of fine Mould..." A somewhat more detailed account was
written in 1688 by John Clayton, an English cl