of carrying his proposition into practical effect, but it seems rather probable that he anticipated that the workmen whom he asked for would be imported in a body from England. That bricks, however, were numerous in the Colony at this time, appears from the fact that Captain Nuce cased the sides of his well with this material. It is also stated that when the Indians on the day of the massacre, in 1622, attacked the home of Ralph Hamer, they were driven off with brick-bats.[1] A still more striking proof of this fact is that bricks now formed one of the principal articles exported from Virginia to the Bermudas, and there exchanged, along with aquavitæ, oil, and sack, for the fruits and plants, ducks, turkeys, and limestone of that fertile island.[2] There is nothing, however, to show that when the letters patent of the Company were revoked in 1624, nearly a full generation after the settlement of the country, there was a single house in the Colony constructed entirely of brick, although brickmen were sufficiently numerous to be made subject to a fixed charge for their labor, that is to say, forty pounds of tobacco for laying one thousand bricks.
Thirteen years after the dissolution of the Company, Governor Wyatt was instructed to require every landowner whose plantation was an hundred acres in extent to erect a dwelling-house of brick, to be twenty-four feet in length and sixteen feet in breadth, with a cellar attached. In the cases in which the area of the grant exceeded five hundred acres, the size of the dwelling-house was to be enlarged in proportion. This order was a fair sample of many received from the authorities in England who had charge of the affairs of the Colony, showing either the most complete ignorance of the conditions surrounding the Virginians, or indifference to the obstacles standing
