During the 17th century, settlers began to establish small plantations near landing places on the Potomac River. Oceangoing ships could load tobacco and other goods to export to Great Britain. The area that was to become Alexandria was still sparsely settled by the late 1740s, with a handful of tobacco warehouses and plantations worked by African-American slaves.
The town of Alexandria was established here in 1749 because the site was the uppermost Virginia anchorage on the tidal Potomac. At the time, the town covered only about 21 blocks; its original southern boundary was located about three blocks north of here. It would grow quickly, however, and received a city charter in 1780.
The river was the city's highway, providing the principal means of transportation for goods and people. Alexandria quickly became an important regional market and an international exporter of tobacco, grain, pork, fish, lumber and other commodities, and importer of manufactured goods from London, Glasgow, and other Atlantic and Caribbean ports. In 1795, Alexandria was the seventh-busiest port in the United States, with 1,000 vessels entering the port annually.
Commercial prosperity encouraged further development of the waterfront. By 1790, merchants had [unreadable] river flats for as much as 100 feet [unreadable] shoreline
[unreadable]. Several prominent men of the [unreadable] Mayor James Keith and Captain John [unreadable] on an unsuccessful development [unreadable] markethouse on South Washington Street which would be linked by a dramatically widened Franklin Street to be an extensive wharf and warehouses along the river. Conservation of Keith's Wharf began in 1785, but by 1804, it was still peripheral to waterfront commerce. It then served primarily as a fish wharf and ferry landing. The bulkhead of Keith's Wharf still exists beneath the Ford's Landing townhouses.
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