Tobacco was currency and the cash crop at the heart of colonial Virginia’s economy when Captain Richard Hobbs of the ship Elizabeth and Mary anchored here in the 1660s and received a land patent for 800 acres. Colonel Benjamin Goodrich was paid 10,000 pounds of tobacco for fifty acres of his land to establish the town in 1682. By 1706, Prince Street was the backbone for access to the earliest businesses and the riverfront, where half-ton wooden hogshead barrels of dried Virginia tobacco rolled down dirt streets to wharves and public warehouses. Enslaved Africans loaded the huge casks onto ships bound for London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Tobacco became the gold Jamestown settlers had been seeking. Near the wharves, foreign sailors crowded the town’s shops and taverns, including the popular Scots Arms Tavern, where English plantation owners and Scottish ship captains mingled with merchants, travelers, and indentured servants. Although officially designated Tappahannock in 1705, the town was called Hobbs Hole throughout the colonial period because a “hole” was a deep place in the river where ships could anchor well. At times as many as ten vessels lay in the harbor, and Tappahannock vied with Fredericksburg upriver in a brisk shipping trade that peaked on the eve of the American Revolution.