Farming using enslaved labor was important to the 19th century economy, and early in the century Edmund Ruffin introduced the use of limestone marl as fertilizer on fields worn out from tobacco crops. Two Mathews County men implicated in Gabriel's Rebellion in 1802 were sentenced to transportation out of the Commonwealth. In a lawsuit begun in 1806, Jackey Wright of Mathews County was granted her freedom from prominent landowner Holder Hudgins due to her grandmother's Native American ancestry in one of the last cases decided by Judge George Wythe, with a Virginia Supreme Court opinion by St. George Tucker.