Headrights in Virginia

Richard Scaggs entered the Virginia colony on a "headright."  In the seventeenth century headrights were a means for the colony to stimulate immigration to address a chronic labor shortage for the local planters.  Virginia headrights, as described by the Library of Virginia:

In order to encourage immigration into the colony, the Virginia Company, meeting in a Quarter Court held on 18 November 1618, passed a body of laws called Orders and Constitutions which came to be considered "the Great Charter of privileges, orders and laws" of the colony. Among these laws was a provision that any person who settled in Virginia or paid for the transportation expenses of another person who settled in Virginia should be entitled to receive fifty acres of land for each immigrant. The right to receive fifty acres per person, or per head, was called a headright. The practice was continued under the royal government of Virginia after the dissolution of the Virginia Company, and the Privy Council ordered on 22 July 1634 that patents for headrights be issued.

 

Richard Scaggs, Early Colonist

We have a lot of information about Richard Scaggs from the colonial records of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.  We don’t know when Richard was born, but we do know he died in Kent County, Maryland c. 1725.  He started in Virginia as a “headright” for 50 acres to a Thomas Dyer.  Richard later shows up as a landowner in Maryland and Delaware, even as a partner with a William Merritt in land in Delaware, William Merritt going on later to operate a ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn and become the mayor of New York City.