(Note: The following is part of a series of articles looking at the history and evolution of agriculture in Georgia and Bulloch County.) John Rolfe, who is considered the first Virginia tobacco planter, established his plantation in 1616 “at West and Sherley Hundred… (with) twenty-five (workers)…imployed onely in planting and curing tobacco” (sic). Colonists soon discovered that tobacco was a hardy annual plant. It ranged in size from the dwarf variety at 18 inches to as much as seven or eight feet in height.