  Two blacksmiths and a gunsmith, as we have seen, came to Jamestown with the earliest settlers, recruited for the obvious reason that their crafts were vital to the survival of any settlement in the wilderness. From the start, both the London Company and the colonial assembly tried to persuade smiths to migrate, and, when they reached the New World, to practice their craft. By way of encouragement, the assembly exempted from taxes and levies artisans who engaged in their crafts and did not plant tobacco. In 1657, in order to assure smiths, tanners, and weavers ample raw materials to work with, it forbade the exportation of iron, hides, and wool. This latter law had a checkered career: it was repealed the next year, reenacted two years later, repealed as a failure after eleven years, reenacted once more after another eleven years, and immediately repealed by royal order as a threat to the trade and commerce of England. Through it all the supply of working smiths remained small in the colony of Virginia, and their charges skyrocketed. The county courts were given regulatory powers “by reason of the unconscionable rates, [that] smiths do exact on the inhabitants of this countrey for their worke.” Later and for another reason—the runaway inflation that accompanied the Revolution—prices of many commodities were commonly fixed. For instance, the price of bar iron (a consumer item for smiths) was set by a Williamsburg town meeting of July 16, 1779, at 800 shillings per ton and eightpence per pound “for the present month.” Shown in this illustration from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, published in several eighteenth-century editions in London, are the basic pieces of equipment in a blacksmith’s shop—then and since. Actually, the bellows connection shown is faulty: the draft must come up through the firebed, not blow across the top of it. Actually the greatest obstacles to the growth in seventeenth-century Virginia of any large manufactory of iron and steel articles were the scarcities of cash money and, even more simply, of towns. Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, in their report to the London Board of Trade, entitled The Present State of Virginia, and the College, described the situation in 1697:
When James Blair and his co-authors wrote of the difficulties faced by artificers, Williamsburg was about to be made the capital of the Virginia colony. Seventy years later Williamsburg was enjoying the height of its golden age—but the soil continued less than fertile for the growth of large-scale and urban iron workshops. Governor Fauquier reported to the board of Trade in 1766:
Fauquier’s report may be discounted as a politically motivated effort to allay the home government’s suspicions that the colonists were engaging too heavily in iron manufacture. As a matter of fact, there was a whitesmith (that is, tinsmith or worker in white metal) by the name of John Bell in Williamsburg at the time Fauquier wrote. Records of the period mention cutlers at work in Williamsburg and elsewhere in the colony. But the point Robert Carter, member of the council and sometime owner of a large home next to the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, had workers on his plantations, white and black apparently, trained as coopers, carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, millers, sailors, bricklayers, shoemakers, and in other skills. He sold iron articles made on his Nomini Hall plantation to his neighbors for cash or produce—such items as hoes, axes, plows, and nails. Although Carter was by no means typical, he being one of Virginia’s wealthiest and most successful farm entrepreneurs, the example of plantation blacksmithing could be repeated many times over. An instance of the availability of indentured servants is found in the 1773 advertisement of James Mills in the Virginia Gazette:
John Tait, another planter, wrote to England for a blacksmith who was “accustomed to coarse Country work,” such as hoes and axes, to be indentured for four or five years and to receive £10 sterling per year in wages, plus “meat, drink, washing & lodging.” Francis Jerdone, a planter and merchant of Louisa County, had an indentured servant who did all of the plantation’s blacksmithing and also brought in as much £7 in one month of 1767 for work done for neighboring farmers. The
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