BELL

As the cultivation of tobacco was too convenient a profit to ignore, the English were disappointed because they wanted the colonists to supply raw goods to the English markets and were looking forward to shipments of iron, timber, potash, hemp, silk, and other commodities. However, the English authorities shot themselves in the foot by repressing every effort of the colonists to manufacture their own clothing and other necessities. Every coat worn by the planter, every dram of spirits consumed by him obtained by trading tobacco with Holland, diminished the value of the Virginia market for English goods. And, as the Europeans moved across the Shenandoah Valley into Kentucky, a different type of emigrant emerged on the landscape. He was the true adventurer. The energetic lifestyle of the hunter and trapper willing to form militias to protect the homestead against marauding Indians created its own forts and economy. So it was that German immigrants and the Scotch-Irish during the early part of the 18th century took the wagon road out of Pennsylvania and crossed through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Previously, head coverings were sewn with beaver fur, sent to England for working up, and returned in the shape of hats to be sold or bartered. But the Kentuckian explorer trapped beaver and other animals for fur and used it to craft necessities required in the wilderness home. Source: History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Philip Alexander Bruce.