Prettyman's Rolling Road, one of the oldest roads in America, descends to the waterfront at the end of Virginia Street in Urbanna, where the early economy of Virginia was built on growing and selling tobacco. Urbanna Creek provided 14 feet of deep water that allowed large ships from New England, the British West Indies, and Great Britain to sail inside the creek, while lighters, barges, and other craft carried wooden hogsheads full of tobacco leaves, each weighing 1000 pounds, out to awaiting ships. A tobacco warehouse was officially established in town by the Virginia Assembly Warehouse Act of 1713, with warehouses located near the end of this street, and the custom house across from here was where tobacco was sold and graded. The Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730 gave warehouses the power to destroy substandard crops and issue bills of exchange for good crops that served as currency, centralizing tobacco inspection at 40 warehouses in the colony. By 1769, Urbanna, Cabin Point, Yorktown, Port Royal, Aquia, Dumfries, and Occoquan were Virginia's officially small tobacco ports, and Urbanna flourished in the half-century before the American Revolution. Although tobacco was the leading export, wheat, corn, peas, beans, flour, hemp, lumber, and flax seed were also shipped from the town's seaport, while ships brought goods from Great Britain and around the world that fueled Urbanna's commerce. Scottish factors from Edinburgh and other Scottish towns established retail stores in these small ports, and the building on this site is the last Colonial Scottish Factor store left in America.