Antiques.

 
Williamsburg is now incorporated and made a Market Town.... Here dwell 
several very good Families.... They live in the same neat Manner, dress 
after the same Modes, and behave themselves exactly as the Gentry in 
London; most Families of any Note having a Coach, Chariot, Berlin, or 
Chaise. 
Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, 1724 

In the "half century immediately preceding the American Revolution," wrote Hunter D. Farish, "a remarkable civilization reached its zenith in the broad coastal plain of eastern Virginia. Gradually, during a century of colonization and expansion, the heavily wooded tidewater had been converted into a land of settled order and accumulated wealth. Vast estates had been carved out of the wilderness and large plantations," like Landon Carter's Sabine Hall, "were everywhere the rule." A French traveler in 1686 had seen a great plantation as "a rather large village"; a hundred years later another Frenchman remarked that the Byrds' seat of Westover, seen from across the James River, "with its different annexes, has the appearance of a small town and forms a most delightful prospect."

While life in the tidewater during this golden age was dominated by the families who possessed these vast estates, if they constituted an aristocracy, it was an aristocracy of middle-class origins. Virginia's great families all became great in the New World--they did not bring their status with them. Landon Carter's father, Robert "King" Carter, for example, had come to the colonies as a self-made man with connections to a family of London wine merchants. In Virginia, where he made his fortune as a tobacco and slave trader, he became the greatest grandee of his time, holding every major ...