Shirley Plantation is Virginia's first plantation (1613) and one of the first economic engines of the new world. Only six years after John Smith's settlement at Jamestown, the crown grant carving Shirley Plantation out of the Virginia frontier was established. The chronicle of Shirley Plantation best exemplifies the period in our nation's history between the settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and the movement towards American independence from Great Britain in 1776. In Virginia, during the late 1600s and early 1700s, the labor of slaves quickly replaced that of English indentured servants. Slavery provided the larger and more permanent labor force necessary for an increasing scale of agricultural production. The largest of plantations like Shirley could function only with considerable numbers of enslaved Africans. Indeed, Shirley ranked at the top of slave-holding plantations over much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.