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Leisure Time In Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Andrew Jackson Johnson

Master's Theses

Eighteenth-century Virginia was strikingly agrarian. Tobacco planting on the plantations and farms created an ever-increasing need for new land. The growth of a dispersed rural society reacted against the formation of urban focal units and a middle class. This society did create, because of the endemic loneliness of the country, a people who desired companionship and proved to be gregarious and convivial.

The hospitality for which Virginians are well known was very much in evidence at this period and served in a subtle way to offer diversion to both guest and host. Travelers were invited to the plantations and farms …