John Rolfe topped the list of people whom participants identified as the most influential person in 17thcentury Virginia. Some mentioned his marriage to Pocahontas in 1614 as an important diplomatic event that opened a new and more peaceful relationship between the Indians and the English. Yet all cited his introduction of a West Indian strain of tobacco to Virginia as the most influential act of any one person. Philip Morris is the Virginia name most closely associated with tobacco in the 21st century. That's because of John Rolfe's actions in the 17th.

Rolfe found what no other colonist had: A profitable product that gave England a reason to support a continuation of the colonial experiment. Historian and archivist Trenton Hizer summed up the significance of the event concisely: Tobacco secured the colony's "survival and growth."

As historian John Deal wrote, "There was no guarantee that someone else might have introduced tobacco or some other cash crop that would have kept the settlement going." But John Rolfe did. A "palatable tobacco," historian Marianne E. Julienne wrote, "gave the colony a raison d'?tre when it was still on the verge of not surviving."

For the next 390 years, tobacco was the most valuable cash crop for Virginia's farmers.

The Times-Dispatch's A. Barton Hinkle dubbed it "a drug whose popularity spread worldwide and which is, even today, second in appeal perhaps only to alcohol."

Historian Bland Whitley commented on how accidents of timing change the course of history. "It was not the innovation per se," he wrote, "but the timing. Once Rolfe proved that Virginia had a commercially viable product, immigration could proceed more rapidly." Historian James Sweeney wrote that the "cultivation of tobacco also gave rise to the planter elite, which controlled society through wealth and political power. John Rolfe's cultivation of tobacco, therefore, shaped the economic and social history of Virginia for centuries."

One of the many consequences of intensive tobacco cultivation, as historian Jennifer Loux noted, was an increased demand for labor. "Planters turned to indentured servants and eventually to captured Africans, around whom the vise of slavery gradually tightened."

Historian Gordon Poindexter concluded, "Had someone found a different staple to support the colony, then Virginia would have become a society unrecognizable to its modern-day residents."

A man with a thoroughly mixed legacy of both good and ill, John Rolfe stands alone as the 17th century's most influential Virginian. -Brent Tarter