1950s Tobacco Farming

In 2010 it occurred to me to pull together an account of how my father farmed tobacco in the 1950s. Those processes have changed so completely. I realize that half a century has clouded my memory. Some of what I recall didn't happen quite like I recall it, and some of what I remember very clearly, never happened at all.

So if you see corrections or additions that should be made, I will appreciate your clueing me in at edrafr9@gmail.com

 

The Tobacco Allotment

This is the way I recall Papa raising and marketing his flu-cured tobacco in the 1950s when I was 5 to 15 years old. (Burly tobacco is the air dried tobacco that our church members had in Owen County, Kentucky, when we were in seminary 1967-1970. They cut the stalk off at the ground and hung up the entire stalk in huge barns with no walls designed for air to pass through freely, curing the tobacco for weeks rather than days.) The government assigned each tobacco farmer a tobacco allotment: the maximum number of acres of tobacco he could raise. This familiar form of government control of a certain product was designed to keep prices higher by limiting the supply. I'm not sure but I believe the allotment was based on the total number of cultivated acres on the farm. Papa's farm, including the woods and all the land, was 148 acres and he had an allotment of eight and a half acres. It was three miles northeast Rolesville, North Carolina, 18 miles northeast of Raleigh.

Surveyors contracted with the government to go to the farms when the tobacco was about half grown, measure the acres planted, and destroy some plants if necessary to conform to the maximum allotment allowed. These people had official documentation of the farm's boundaries and in some cases aerial photographs. Sometime around the early 1970s the government changed the acreage allotment to a poundage allotment. Thereafter a farmer could plant as many acres as he wanted but was able to sell only a designated number of pounds. The result was that it was permissible to plant more acreage and sell only the highest quality tobacco leaves up to his maximum poundage allotment. This arrangement did away with the necessity of paying someone to measure acreage. The tobacco markets reported to a central state office the amount of pounds that each farmer sold.

 

The Tobacco Plant Bed

Workers planted the tobacco in plant beds in late January or February, set it out in the fields in late April and May, and harvested it in July to September depending on the kind of tobacco and the seasons. They could buy tobacco seed in most local farm supply stores in tin boxes about two inches long, high, and wide. Tobacco seed are smaller than sesame seed, with several thousand seed in one box costing $10.00 to $50.00 depending on the variety. Two boxes of seed produced more than enough plants for Papa's eight and a half acres.

The plant bed was about 30 feet by 50 feet, located in a sunny spot with trees on all sides to break the wind. They made the ground as smooth, soft, and free of rocks and debris as possible. Before planting the tobacco seed they fumigated or gassed the whole plant bed: sterilized it of any weed or grass seed. They placed in the bed several plastic boxes open on top. Each box had two to four pint sized cans of fumigant gas. They placed each can upside down in its box, directly over a nail or spike affixed on the box bottom so as to puncture the can and release the fumigant when they pushed the can downward. They covered the whole bed with a single large piece of plastic. They made the plastic air tight around the edges by placing dirt or logs on it. Then they pushed down on the cans of fumigant under the plastic. The gas killed any living thing under the plastic, plant or animal, but did not hinder seed sprouting and growing after they removed the plastic.

After about two days they removed the plastic and cans, and sowed the tobacco seed as soon as possible before other weed and grass seed blew in and sprouted. They scattered the tobacco seed on top of the ground. Since the seed are too small to actually cover with soil, they mashed them with a smooth roller of any kind, or beat the ground with brush. Wherever a person walked on the seed, that's where they would sprout first because they were pressed into the soil.

For two months or more they kept the bed covered with cheese cloth that could be bought in huge sheets. We called it plant bed cloth. (If the seed were planted early, sometimes they put the plastic back over the bed for a week or two to provide additional warmth until the seed sprouted. Then they replaced the plastic with plant bed cloth.) Held up six to ten inches above the seed, this cloth provided something of a green house effect. It allowed the tender plants to get air, but gave enough weather protection for them to sprout and start growing. The cloth was held up and off the ground by logs or boards placed around the bed's perimeter and by creek reeds or small supple limbs inside the bed. In the top of the logs they drove small nails half way in and bent them 15 degrees or so away from the bed. They bent the reeds or sticks so that both ends stuck in the ground and the centers rose six to ten inches above the ground. They placed them three to four feet apart throughout the bed. They attached the cloth to the nails, pulling it tight enough to stay off the ground with the help of the reeds.

If everything worked perfectly the tobacco plants grew to the necessary five inches to seven inches tall without much grass or weeds. Sometimes however they had to pull the weeds and grass out from among the tobacco plants. To weed the beds, the workers pulled the cloth up off the log nails and rolled it back very carefully. Placing their feet also very carefully they would step into the bed and try to pull the weeds and grass without uprooting the tobacco plants. Then they replaced the cloth on the log nails. As the weather warmed and the plants grew, they removed and discarded the cloth.

When the plants were five to seven inches tall the workers pulled them up one by one being careful not to damage the stems and roots any more than necessary. They called these small plants tobacco slips. They laid them in bunches of 25 so they would know how many they had pulled. They placed the bunches in baskets and took them to the field where they were to be set out in rows.

 

Setting Out Tobacco Plants

They rotated crops from year to year. A field might be planted in corn one year, wheat the next, and tobacco the third year. That rotation helped to control crop–specific diseases that might linger in the soil through one winter, but not through two winters.

Before the tobacco plants were pulled up in the plant bed, they had prepared the rows in the field to receive the young plants. The soil had to be soft and relatively free of rocks and debris. In late winter they had plowed the field often enough that weeds and grass had no chance to sprout and grow. In the late 1950s more and more farmers used subsoilers once in the spring. These were long, strong metal teeth that went 24 inches or more deep into the soil. Running that subsoiler every three or four feet enabled the field to absorb and hold moisture more effectively all season long. As bigger and stronger equipment made deeper cultivation possible in the late twentieth century, they used subsoilers less often.

They laid off the rows 44 inches apart and hilled them up so that the row was eight to ten inches higher than the middle between the rows. Years earlier they set out tobacco plants with a hand setter. The setter was a metal tube about 24 inches tall, nine or ten inches in diameter at the top and narrowing to a point at the bottom. The largest part of the setter was the water compartment, holding about two gallons of water. Beside the water compartment there was a shaft two to four inches in diameter for the tobacco plant to slide down and out the bottom. The setter had a handle on the top so the worker could carry it in one hand. Under the handle was a trigger that opened a valve in the bottom of the water container to allow a half cup of water to pour down. The same trigger also opened two metal flaps to allow the plant to fall through. The worker pushed the bottom of the setter four to six inches into the soft dirt, pulled the trigger releasing the water and opening the flaps. He dropped one tobacco plant in the plant shaft and lifted the setter up, careful to keep the flaps open until they cleared the plant. Then with his foot he pushed dirt from two sides up to the plant, and moved on to set out another plant. He carried 50 or more tobacco plants in a sack or pouch at his side, with a strap slung over his shoulder.

Tobacco farmers often put chlordane or some other insecticide in the water to keep the plant roots free of insects and disease for the first few days. The EPA banned chlordane in 1988 because it does not break down in the environment. Wherever rain water takes it, it's still poisonous years later.

Mechanized tractor tobacco setters began to replace the hand setters for most farmers in the early 1950s. The cultivating tractor itself was roughly the size of a compact car, with wheels tall enough that the tractor could straddle a row of tobacco or other crop until it was 18 or 20 inches tall. The motor was in front and offset 12 to 15 inches to the left so that the operator, sitting a little to the right of center near the rear, could see the row underneath the front half of the tractor. The front wheels were small, perhaps 20 to 24 inches tall. The rear wheels were larger, perhaps four feet tall and ten to twelve inches wide.

The mechanized tobacco setter had a V–shaped row leveler that set underneath the tractor near the front. It could be raised or lowered hydraulically, and was used to level the row for the actual setter, which was attached to the back of the tractor and extended four or five feet behind it. The tractor had a water tank to supply water to the plants. One person sat in each of two chairs on either side of the setter behind the tractor. They each had about 100 tobacco plants piled in their laps. As the tractor moved down a row, just behind the leveler a small plow point opened up a narrow slot about five inches deep in the dirt in the center of the row. Next, one of the workers dropped a tobacco plant into that slot. At the same time a valve driven by the tractor wheels opened to pour half a cup of water in on the plant's roots. Immediately behind that, two mechanical hands pulled the dirt from the left and right sides of the row up around the plant's roots.

The tractor moved down the row slowly, perhaps at about two feet per second. The two workers seated on the setter dropped plants alternately about 22 to 26 inches apart in the row. The tractor driver had to give careful attention to keeping the tractor over the center of the row. Since the setter was actually behind the tractor, and the steering was done by the front wheels, the slightest inattention to the steering could result in plants being set several inches from the middle of the row, which would cause major cultivation and harvesting problems later on.

Cultivating Tobacco

When tobacco setting was finished, the entire surface of the field was fresh, loose dirt. It took only a few days however for weeds and grass to sprout. When the sprouts were small they were easy to kill with a cultivator. If they got larger and more established they had to be chopped up by hand with a hoe. To cultivate the field the farmer had tractor cultivators. Four metal teeth two or three inches wide and six to eight inches long, were attached to a bar. There was one bar for each side of a row. The bars were adjusted at a forty-five degree angle to the row and attached to the hydraulic lift under the front of the tractor. The two bars of teeth were far enough apart that they did not disturb the tobacco in the center of the row. The inner end of each bar was set higher as it was closer to the center of the row than the outer end of the bar. As the tractor operator drove down the row he could look down and see whether the teeth were deep enough to destroy the weeds but not deep enough to disturb the tobacco. They called these bars and teeth cultivators.

Behind the tractor on another hydraulic mechanism there were two middle busters, one behind each wheel. These were wing like cultivating teeth, maybe nine to twelve inches wide but only two to four inches deep. Their purpose was to lightly disturb the ground behind the tractor wheels. This disturbance would kill any newly sprouted weeds or grass and allow more rain water to soak in.

After the tractor had cultivated a row the only undisturbed dirt would be at the very top of the row, between the tobacco plants. Some one usually used a hoe, sometimes their bare hands, to remove weeds and grass in that narrow section. Sometimes the cultivator got too close to a small tobacco plant and covered it up. The worker with the hoe also had to look for these covered plants and uncover them by hand. Then the whole field was weed and grass free for a few more days. Farmers paid close attention to being ready to cultivate tobacco two or three days after a rain. Rain prompted weed and grass seed to sprout, and also left the soil surface hard, which speeded up moisture evaporation and slowed down growth of the tobacco plant. Immediately after a rain the ground was too muddy to cultivate; cultivating muddy soil causes it to harden like clay.

They called the last plowing of row crops laying it by. They tried to lay the crop by just before it got too tall for the cultivating tractor to pass over it any more. Underneath the tractor, on the same hydraulic system used earlier for the cultivating teeth, they would attach two flat moldboards, like wings or giant hands, maybe 18 inches by eight inches, one on either side of the row. A wider section of the moldboard was forward and adjusted so that it could be lowered into the dirt down in the middle between the rows. It was angled back, with the back portion not as wide as the front. As the tractor moved down the row, the moldboard scooped dirt from the middle and rolled it up toward the tobacco plants at the top of the row. This operation deposited some fresh dirt up near the plant stalk. Fertilizer often was included in this cultivation.

Tobacco required a lot of fertilizer. The basic tractor fertilizer mechanism was a round can of sorts (a hopper) holding about ten gallons. It might be positioned in front of the driver, on the front of the tractor, or on the back of the tractor. It had a flexible metal tube two or three inches in diameter, extending from the funneled bottom of the can down to the ground. It had some revolving mechanism in the bottom of the can to release a little or a lot of fertilizer as the tractor moved down the row. There were several different kinds of mechanisms to open a small trench for the fertilizer to fall into. If it were just dropped on top of the ground it would take much longer for it to break down and benefit the plant. If it were placed in the ground the roots reached it much quicker and it broke down much quicker as well. They called it top dressing when they placed the fertilizer near the top or center of the row. They called it side dressing when they placed it farther away from the center of the row. Side dressing was more appropriate for larger plants with more developed root systems.

Sometimes the farmer put fertilizer in the row just before the plants were set out. Thereafter he might fertilize two or three times during a season. Before tractors came into wide use, mules or horses pulled smaller but similar fertilizer implements.

In the late 1950s farmers increasingly bought irrigation systems. Most of these consisted of an engine, perhaps 10 to 25 horsepower, 15 to 20 foot sections of thin metal pipe three to six inches in diameter, and sprinklers. They drew water from ponds or streams. Papa built the lower pond, about three acres, in the early 1950s, primarily for irrigation, although he loved to fish too. They laid larger diameter pipes nearer the pump engine and smaller diameter pipes as the line diverged into several arms. The pipes connected quickly and easily with a quarter turn, a rubber gasket making each joint more or less water tight. The sprinklers could be placed at any joint in the pipes. The sprinklers were on three fourths or one inch inch pipes that stood up five to seven feet so they could be placed in crops that were already tall and growing. They placed the sprinklers 30 to 60 feet apart depending on the size of the pump and sprinkler capacity.

Sometimes they would pour 50 or 100 pounds of concentrated nitrogen or other fertilizer in the water intake of the pump. It would dissolve, be distributed through the irrigation system into the field, and soak in with the water.

Most farm tractors had a power take off (PTO) mechanism, and some irrigation pumps were designed to be powered by this kind of tractor PTO rather than the pump having its own dedicated engine.

Tobacco Growing Challenges

The tobacco leaf was the goal of the tobacco crop, so the workers had to keep the plant's strength from going to succors, tobacco worms (elsewhere called tomato worms), or seed tops. When the plants were about half grown they began to produce succors where each leaf joined the plant's main trunk or stalk. So we had the fun job of succoring the tobacco: breaking out those succors. There were chemicals in liquid form that helped prevent succors. These could be applied in three or four different ways.

Tobacco worms were a problem. Again pesticides came to the rescue. Tractors had 50 or 100 gallon water tanks and spraying systems to apply chemicals. In the late 1950s special tractors began appearing with very tall, very narrow wheels designed to drive down rows when the crops were up to perhaps five feet tall. That made pesticides more useable later in the growing season.

I can barely remember a crop duster that Papa had when I was small. It was a metal barrel shaped container, maybe 10 or 15 gallons in size, with a lid. It had three wheels and was pulled by a mule. The two rear wheels carried the weight; the front wheel was for balance only. The operator controlled the duster with two handles behind. Two flexible metal arms, each about six feet long, could be adjusted to the best height. As the mule pulled the duster along between two rows, the rear wheels drove an agitator bar and a fan inside. The agitator bar inside the barrel stirred the dust, creating a constant air–borne dust. The fan drew that air-borne dust up and out the top ends of the arms, to fall on the crop.

Aerial spraying (by airplane) was a possibility although it seems to me that I heard less and less about it toward the middle of the 1960s. A farmer could contact the people who did the aerial spraying and pay them to apply a given amount of a specified liquid pesticide to a designated tobacco field. The dangers were overspraying adjacent areas, poisons drifting elsewhere before they settled to the ground, and spraying the wrong field. I don't recall Papa ever using aerial sprayers. My brothers Roy and Syl used them a time or two when they managed the farm after Papa retired around 1955.

Tobacco also had to be topped. The flowering seed tops of a tobacco plant can get perhaps one fourth as large as the rest of the plant. Tobacco farmers understandably wanted to channel that much of the plant's energy into the leaves that he could sell rather than into the flowers and seed tops which were of no use at all. When the plants began to mature, usually at four to five feet tall, the flowering tops would appear. Depending on the weather and other farm chores, the farmer liked to do the topping as soon as it became clear where the highest leaves would be and the flower tops began. Workers went down each row breaking the tops off and throwing them on the ground. After topping, tobacco plants finished growing at three to six feet tall, with 10 to 15 leaves, each as small as 15 by 6 inches or as large as 36 by 18 inches. Topping a plant would trigger its succoring response, so it was a safe bet that the succor problem had to be addressed soon after topping.

Weather often was a problem. Summer storms sometimes produced hail which easily punctured the soft tobacco leaves in the field. A brief hail event of a few seconds might not affect a crop significantly. But it was not unheard of for a field of tobacco to be ripped to shreds by large hail continuing for three to four minutes. All tobacco farmers carried hail insurance.

Wind could be a problem also. Summer storms could soak the ground and blow corn and tobacco plants over. After a pop up summer storm Papa often went into his fields to stand stalks of tobacco and corn back up in the soft muddy soil. He would hold the stalk upright, and with his feet he pushed the wet dirt in place to hold the plant up.

Barning Season: Priming Tobacco

Papa had a gift for organizing work and workers. With only a fourth grade education, still he was good at planning how many people needed to be working on what tasks so that the work moved along most efficiently. No doubt he learned some of his organizational skills in the army, but he also had a natural affinity systematizing. I don't remember him being rude or disrespectful to any of his family or other workers. He didn't write more than his name, but he did math mentally and had no trouble figuring things like rows, acres, tobacco sticks, and other farm computations.

When barning season (the time when they took the leaves from the field and put them into barns to cure) began, the mules pulled the slide trucks in the field. Mag and Kate were Papa's two large mules. In the morning they would get a mule out of the stable, put a bridle and bit on it, and a collar. They attached two traces (light chains) to the collar, and two lines (ropes) to the bridle. A single tree was a strong piece of wood about two and a half inches round, with rings at either end to connect the traces to. In the middle it had another ring to connect to the slide truck, plow, or whatever. They hooked the mule to a slide truck and went to the field, guiding the mule with the lines.

A double tree was made the same way as a single tree, but longer and stronger. Any implement that required two mules rather than one, was pulled by a double tree. They hooked the middle ring of the double tree to the implement, then hooked each end ring of the double tree to the middle ring of one mule's single tree. Papa kept the collars, traces, lines, single trees, double trees, and anything else having to do with the mules' harness, in the harness room. That was a shed about five by six feet that stood close to the mule stables.

Some farmers preferred horses. I've heard that horses as a rule are easier to handle. Mules are more stubborn, but stand up better to the mid–day heat in the hot summer. The tobacco field can be a hot, hot place.

The mules plodded to the field like they were drunk and sickly: heads down, trudging along slowly. Without watches or clocks however they knew when lunch time arrived, and began to step lively. If the primers wanted to get one more set of rows before lunch it could be awfully difficult to get a hungry, thirsty mule headed back into the field again. Then when they started for the stable they practically jogged. Papa had built a watering trough of lumber considerably thicker than a two inch board. It was maybe 15 inches wide, 12 inches deep, and six feet long. He had run a water line to it with a spicket (same as a spigot). It was amazing the amount of water that those two large mules could drink at one time at the end of the morning or afternoon. They made a contented sucking noise as they drank.

They primed the tobacco (picked or pulled it off the stalk leaf by leaf) when it began to turn yellow. They might prime a field as little as three times or as many as six times. Usually they took one to four leaves with each priming.

The bottom leaves ripened first, turning from a dark rich green to a lighter green, then to yellow. They were the bottom primings: dirty and more damaged by disease and field critters than the nicer leaves higher up. Primers (the workers who primed the leaves) hated bottom primings. To begin with, those were the first leaves to be taken, and their wrists were not yet accustomed to twisting around tobacco stalks and breaking off leaves for several hours a day. They got really sore. Added to the wrist pain, they had to bend 'way over to reach the leaves. It was like standing on your head all day. Legs and hips got sore too. By the time priming began, they hadn't cultivated for at least two to three weeks. Grass and weeds were up and you had to reach into places you couldn't see. Snakes! In the morning everything was wet with due. Bottom primings were just a bad day.

The primers had rain suits. These were heavy, hot, rubber or plastic pants and coats, 'way oversized so they could wear them over other clothes. The primers usually hit the fields early, wanting to get as much done as possible before the sun got high in the sky. That meant that the tobacco was loaded to the dripping point with dew for the first hour or two. Primers constantly brushed against those leaves and could quickly get just as soaked with dew as if they had been caught in the rain. Of course, there was a half hour or so when the tobacco was too wet to take the rain suits off, but it was hot enough to make them sweat profusely. At times the choice was whether to get wet with dew or sweat, but there was no dry choice. A lot of adults as well as children went barefoot in the summer. Sunday at church was about the only time I wore shoes June through August.

The primers placed the leaves in a slide truck (also called sled, slide, or truck). These were made just for this purpose of taking tobacco from the field to the barnyard. They varied a lot in size and design. They might be 20 to 24 inches wide, eight feet long, and four feet tall.

They sat on the slides: two boards two inches thick and ten inches wide, one on either side, cut at an angle at the ends so they would slide along the ground. They built a floor on top of the slides. They attached upright one inch by four inches standards at each corner and in the middle on each side. They drove nails three quarters of the way in, on top of the standards. They attached burlap (from burlap fertilizer bags) to these nails, and the bottom of the burlap was long enough to lay loose on the slide truck's floor. They attached strong hooks to either end of the slide truck so it could be pulled by a mule or by the tractor.

They laid off tobacco rows with every fifth row left out. The mule pulled the slide truck down that fifth row, the skipped row, while one or two primers on either side primed the tobacco on the two rows nearest the slide truck. The mule would pull on command and stop on command most of the time. At the end of the row the tractor driver or someone with another mule waited with an empty slide truck. They called this person the trucker. He pulled the full slide back to the barnyard and the primers started back into the next set of rows with the empty slide.

Stringing Tobacco

In the barnyard they strung the tobacco on tobacco sticks, using horses and tobacco string. The sticks were 50 inches long and most were made by splitting. They averaged about seven eights or one inch thick. I'm told that Papa knew how to make these tobacco sticks by a process he called riving. He would find a suitable limb or tree trunk, cut it to 50 inches, and then split out the sticks. He must have had 2500 to 3500, at this writing (2009) still piled under the stick shelter built onto the left side of the strip room. From somewhere he had gotten perhaps 100 or 200 sawed tobacco sticks: one inch by one inch sticks of the same 50 inches length.

Stringers and handers worked in the barnyard. Two handers stood at the side of the slide, one toward each end. They unhooked the burlap from the nails on top of the standards so they could reach the tobacco. They gathered it in bundles of three or four leaves each, with the stems together and flush at the stem ends, and handed the bundles to the stringer. When the slide was empty they reattached the burlap, pulled the slide out of the way, and it was ready for the trucker to take it back to the field for another load.

Tobacco gum is a unique sticky substance. Primers, handers, and stringers often got so much gum on their hands in a half day they could rub it off and make a ball the size of a ping pong ball. There were two to three different kinds of special soap that dissolved tobacco gum, but normal soap didn't get it off.

All of this was every bit as much fun as it sounds.

Tobacco string came in one or two pound spools. We used maybe 20 two pound spools in a season. The string was four or five times larger in diameter than thick sewing thread, but much softer. It was made of cotton, and was dirty white. The stringer positioned the spool on the ground nearby so the tobacco thread came off the spool easily and continually while she strung tobacco.

The stringer used a horse. This was a wooden contraption with two opposing one inch by four inch boards rising straight up about 48 inches apart and facing each other. Each one by four had a V–shaped groove cut in the top to lay a tobacco stick in. One of the one by four inch boards had a stop piece attached about two inches out so the tobacco stick would not slide out. The horse was placed perpindicular to the side of the slide at the center. The stringer stood beside the horse, and laid a tobacco stick in the grooves with the stop at the back. She tied the tobacco string to the end of the stick closest to the slide.

With the string in her right hand, with her left hand she took a bundle from one of the handers, wrapped the string around it once and slid the bundle along the string, down tight against the stick. Then she took another bundle from the other hander, wrapped it the same way, and slid it down to the other side of the stick. She began stringing at the end of the stick closest to the slide, and worked away from it, pulling against the stop as she went. When she came to the end of the stick she tied the string again to the stick and broke it off, ready to begin with another stick. The result was a stick with tobacco bundle heads (stem ends) standing two or three inches above the stick, the leaf tails hanging down below.

Some farmers used 54 inch tobacco sticks. They were difficult if not impossible to interchange with the 50 inch sticks because the horses and barns were built to accommodate a certain length.

They placed the stick full of green tobacco either in a pile or in tobacco racks to await the end of the day when all the sticks would be hung in a barn nearby. When sticked tobacco was to be piled, the first stick was laid at what became one end of the pile, bundle heads toward the pile end and tails toward the pile's center. The next stick was laid with the bundle heads a couple or three inches on the tail ends of the first stick. At the other end of the pile they reversed the stem ends and the tail ends, piling the next layer back in the opposite direction.

Most barnyards had a tobacco shelter of some description so they could do the stringing out of the rain. In a light rain with no thunder and lightning the primers continued to work. Papa had a tobacco shelter maybe 50 feet long adjoining two tobacco barns that faced each other. They strung the tobacco in the middle of the shelter and then hung the sticks in racks built at both ends. That center section of the shelter, open on both sides, was large enough that the tractor or mule could pull the slide truck in and a stringer and two handers could work on each side of the slide if necessary.

Lunch time was 11:30 to 1:00. The hired family that lived there in the tenant house on Papa's farm went to their house for lunch. Everybody else came to our house. The other help that was hired for the day ate in the kitchen and our family ate in the dining room (which later became the den). We wolfed down lunch as fast as possible and then napped on the bunk or elsewhere 'till Papa called at 1:00 to get back to work. At mid morning and sometimes around mid afternoon Papa provided cold soft drinks and nabs for all the workers. Water was available to everybody all the time. The trucker brought ice water to the primers often, when he didn't forget. In season, we had an abundance of watermelons. We could slice them with tobacco string, eat only the heart, and throw the rest away or give it to the hogs. The juice on hands and clothes wasn't even noticed because the tobacco gum was so much worse than the watermelon juice.

About 3:30 or 4:30 in the afternoon the primers came to the barn and helped finish getting all the tobacco strung. Sometimes the primers worked faster than the stringers and handers, and there would be three or four trucks of tobacco waiting to be strung. Then it was time to hang the sticks in the barn. Papa tried to have the barn filled and the day's work nearly finished 'long 'bout the shank o' the evenin'.

Papa had five tobacco barns: the little barn, the big barn, and three sort of in between in size. The three were about 17 feet square and maybe 22 feet tall. Inside, about seven feet off the ground, three tier poles or tiers were positioned about 46 inches apart, parallel to the ground, from the door side of the barn to the far side. More tiers were placed in the same direction directly above those three, all the way to the top of the barn, spaced about 22 inches one above the other. These three sections of tiers divided the barn into four rooms. The little barn had shorter rooms. The big barn had five rooms rather than four. Along the two walls parallel to the tiers they nailed strong boards level with the tiers. The boards supported one end of the tobacco sticks and the tiers supported the other end. It was not unusual to find a black snake laying on a tier pole.

Tobacco barns were constructed in different ways. Papa's typical barn was set on a foundation of rocks and mortar extending up one to two feet above ground level. On that foundation they erected a wooden frame with horizontal siding of one inch wooden boards. They used the same kind of one inch wooden boards for sheathing the roof, and covered the roof with tin. They covered the sides with rolled asphalt roofing material to make it more air tight, and placed vertical boards every two to three feet to hold the roofing material in place. Barns had dirt floors, and most had two doors on opposite sides of the barn.

 

Curing Tobacco

Two of the strongest men climbed up into the tier poles in one corner of the barn, one foot on one pole and the other foot on the parallel pole or board 46 inches away. One man would be on the bottom pair of tier poles; the other would be above him to hang the top tiers. Other workers began passing the sticked tobacco from the pile or from the racks up to the men on the tier poles. The first stick went to the top against the wall. They hung the next stick directly under the first, and so on down to the bottom tier poles. With the next stick they started at the top again and worked downward. When that room was full, they hung the room on the opposite side so they could finish up with the two middle sections. They would hang 350 to 500 sticks of tobacco in a barn.

They cured the tobacco for the first couple of days at 95 to 100 degrees. They wanted it to dry out slowly and evenly. After a couple days' initial drying and shrinking, air circulated better between the sticks. Then they increased the temperature to around 180 degrees for six or seven days. When all the green color was gone and the stems were brown and dry, they took out a barn of tobacco. They did this normally before sunrise as that same barn was to be filled again that same day most often. They did this often by a light on a drop cord.

When the tobacco ripened fast and/or weather prevented barning at a steady pace, they might put in two barns of tobacco in a day. They doubled the day's work either by starting earlier and working later, or by hiring more primers, handers, and stringers for the day, or both. Sometimes they put in a barn and a half in a day. They preferred not to do that unless it was necessary because they would have half a barn that was fresh and half a barn that had been drying out for 24 hours longer; the two halves would not cure equally.

Years ealier when Papa heated all his barns with wood, he built what we called the bunk onto the side of the little barn. The barns were in a bunch about 150 yards from the house. He had to feed those fires at regular intervals through the night, so with a pillow and a couple of light blankets he could spend the night on the bunk close to the fires, making that task more convenient. Papa let the barn fires go out on Saturday at midnight and he rekindled them at midnight Sunday. By the time I came along Roy and Syl were the ones staying in the bunk through the night. I looked forward to that when I got old enough to sleep down there too.

To build the bunk Papa attached a roof the full length of one side of the little barn, extending it out about 12 feet from the barn. That created a shelter 12 feet by 18 feet. At one end of this sheltered area he built the nine foot by six foot bunk with a floor three feet off the ground, the two long sides screened in, one end against the barn wall, and the other end covered with wood siding. The screened in side that was under the roof also had a screen door to access the bunk. The other screened side was flush with the side of the barn and needed a wooden awning that could be raised for ventilation and lowered for protection from wind and rain.

When I was a small child Papa still heated the little barn with wood. The furnace was made of brick and mortar, maybe 12 feet long and 24 inches high and wide. The bottom of the furnace was the ground, and the sides and top made a half circle shape. One end opened to the outside of the barn, under the shelter and near the bunk, which always frightened me. Papa fed the wood into the furnace from that outside opening. He got pine slabs from the saw mill or any other cheap wood for this curing process. Inside the barn, floor heat pipes about 12 inches in diameter connected to the other end of the furnace and lay in connected rows covering half or two thirds of the barn floor. The heat radiated upward from those pipes to cure the tobacco. At the end of the last row of this floor pipe, a six inch diameter chimney pipe rose straight up and out the barn roof. This chimney pipe, the floor pipes, and the furnace all acted together to draw like a fireplace. Papa had a large hoe welded on the end of an iron rod about 12 feet long, to rake the ashes out of the furnace when they accumulated.

He heated his other four barns with kerosene heaters, perhaps 42 inches tall and 24 inches in diameter. The big barn had five heaters and the other three barns had four each. Each barn had a 50 or 100 gallon tank for the kerosene just outside with lines going to each heater inside. Each heater had its separate kerosene volume control so the temperature could be regulated.

The heaters had shallow pans on top that held about an inch of sand. These pans were several inches wider in diameter than the heaters. If a dry leaf fell directly down on a heater, it would have ignited easily. If it fell on the sand pan however, it was much less likely to ignite. Every year tobacco barns burned down in the community. I don't think one of Papa's barns ever burned down.

To take the tobacco out, they just reversed the hanging process. Two men climbed up into the barn and handed the sticks down to others waiting below. A stick that weighed 20 pounds going in might weigh three pounds or less coming out. The cured tobacco was piled on a flatbed trailor, taken to the pack house, and piled inside there until the barning season was over. Whenever sticked tobacco was piled they used the same technique as with green tobacco: the stem ends of one stick were laid on the tail ends of the previous stick. The pack house was the largest building on the farm other than the house itself. Papa kept five to ten fox hounds until he was not able to go hunting any more. At one point the fox hounds had a pen behind the pack house and they slept under it. Unlike people, fleas have better sense than to mess with tobacco, so that was a good place for the dogs to sleep and get out of the weather.

Each year the pack house got its first use in the spring. Papa would buy a huge quantity of fertilizer in 200 pound burlap bags. It came on an 18 wheeler flatbed and they off loaded it into the pack house. Papa had ordered the right amount and the right kind of fertilizer for all his crops for that year. By the time he needed to store his cured tobacco in the pack house, he had already used almost all of the fertilizer. He kept those burlap bags and washed them in the creek to get as much fertilizer as possible out of them. After that they had many uses. The seams could be ripped out of one side and the bottom, leaving a burlap sheet roughly three feet by four feet. Sometimes they sewed four or six of these together to make a strong sheet six by eight or nine by eight. They used these larger sheets to gather and carry loose tobacco leaves, ears of corn, and in other ways.

Grading Tobacco

After barning season was over Papa spent two to three months getting his crop to market. This process revolved around the strip room, so named because that's where the cured tobacco was stripped off the sticks. The strip room was about 16 by 20 feet, a one room building with a 6 by 22 foot stick shelter (where Papa kept the tobacco sticks when they were not in use) on one side and another six by 22 foot closed in shed on the other side. I have no idea what that shed was for. Under the strip room proper was what we called the pit, a cellar maybe ten feet by ten feet by seven feet tall. It had dirt walls, a dirt floor,and two rooms of racks for hanging the cured tobacco. The strip room had one door which opened under the stick shelter, a wooden floor, a double window, and a wood stove. Just inside the strip room door, in the floor there was a trap door with a strong leather strap to pull it up and open, allowing access down into the pit by virtue of a built in ladder.

Before the cured tobacco could be readied for market it had to be brought into order, meaning to get enough moisture in it that it could be handled easily. As the cured tobacco laid in the pack house for weeks, sometimes it could get so dry that they could hardly touch it without it crumbling. They brought it into order in two ways. If it was not terribly dry they repacked it, either in the pack house or in the strip room, misting each layer lightly. Papa had a three gallon sprayer that I don't ever remember being used for anything other than this misting process. In fact we called it the tobacco sprayer. Four to 18 hours after repacking and misting, it would absorb the moisture and was much easier to handle. They hung the driest tobacco down in the pit. Overnight the moisture from the ground always brought it into good order.

When it was ready for the next process, Papa set his and Mama's chairs with their backs to the window so they could get good daylight. He and she would grade the whole crop: every single leaf. They would put the nicest yellow leaves together, the still-green ones together, the red leathery ones, the trashy brown ones, etc. He set the grading bench in front of their chairs. That was a wide board six to eight feet long with legs on the ends and lots of one inch holes in the board. He had several sticks about 15 inches long, and the ends of those sticks fit those holes. He used those sticks to make separate spots for the various grades of tobacco.

In the center of the strip room someone stripped the cured tobacco off the sticks, reversing the process that the stringer had gone through a couple months earlier. He placed the stripped tobacco at the proper place on Papa's grading bench. He and Mama graded it, and placed each leaf back in the spot for its grade on the grading bench. Others were working at the same time, taking these graded leaves and tying them into bundles again.

This time the bundles each contained up to 15 leaves, the stems being much smaller than when they were green. They gathered the stems tightly together in the head of the bundle, ends flush. They chose a long, strong leaf and folded it once along the spine. They began with the tail end of the leaf wrapped around the stem ends in the head of the bundle, and wound it tightly downward about three inches. Then they tucked the wrapping leaf's stem into the center of the bundle as tightly as possible. If these bundles were not assembled carefully and tightly, they could come apart later. Grandmama made the best bundles. Each bundle had only one grade of tobacco: yellow, red, or whatever grade.

They placed the bundles on tobacco sticks with the heads up and the loose leaves hanging down. Each stick had only one grade of tobacco on it. These sticks were uniformly strong, trimmed and whittled very smooth because they had to slide the tobacco off these sticks later at the market. They placed a smooth stick on the horse, grasped each bundle firmly, separated the loose leaf part of the bundle into two parts and pushed it down onto the stick. When the stick was full of bundles they laid it with other full sticks in a pile by the wall, stem ends laid on tail ends: the same technique as used for green and for cured sticked tobacco, explained earlier.

At this point the tobacco pile could be packed tightly without harming the tobacco. They used a packing board: a smooth, wide, flat board about four feet long. They laid it on top of the pile and children or even adults sat or stood for a few seconds on the board to compress the pile. Sometimes a light mist was added again between the layers.

Mama would leave the strip room an hour before lunch (we called that dinner) or dinner (we called that supper), to go to the house and get the meal ready. The strip room faced the back porch of the house, about 40 yards away. When Mama had the meal ready she came to the back porch and gave a distinctive high pitched call.

Off to Market

When they had about 75 to 80 of these bulky sticks of tobacco ready, they loaded them on a pickup truck, tied it down securely with ropes, and took it to a tobacco auction market in Louisburg. The tobacco market was a one story warehouse roughly the size of a football field. Farmers drove their trucks inside and unloaded their tobacco into baskets.

The baskets were about 40 inches square and only five or six inches deep. While one man held a stick of tobacco firmly, a packer slid half the bundles off the stick, grasping them tightly together. He laid those in one side of the basket, heads to the outside and tails to the inside. The packer then packed three more half sticks of bundles on the bottom level so that each of the basket's four sides had heads out and tails in. Continuing in this fashion he stacked the tobacco two to three feet high on each basket.

They stacked each grade of tobacco in a separate basket or baskets. They gave each basket an identifying number, weighed it, marked its weight on the top, and dragged it into any of several long lines of baskets. Every few days the tobacco company buyers would come to the warehouse and an auctioneer would auction off each basket. The buyers bid on each basket based on its weight and quality of tobacco. The auctioneer and those working with him communicated the buying price of each basket to the warehouse office. There other people tallied the sale for each farmer and wrote checks to them.

Obviously, tobacco farmers had one pay period per year. They might receive several checks over about two months, but there were many months with no income at all. Waiting on the weather could be stressful to say the least.

 

Later, Back in the Field

Back in the tobacco field the farmers had two problems. First, the tobacco stalks were standing upright three to four feet, and were up to two inches in diameter at the base. A tobacco stalk is like soft wood: it does not decay quickly without some help. Unless they were chopped up and buried, the following spring they would still be standing there, making it impossible to prepare the ground to plant another crop. They solved this problem with a tobacco stalk cutter. This was a rolling cylinder of blades facing outward, pulled behind a tractor. The cylinder consisted of several blades perhaps four inches wide and 36 inches long. As it rolled, the sharp edges of the blades pushed the tobacco stalks down and cut them into pieces six or eight inches long. That made them easier to plow into the ground where they would rot quickly and make the soil more fertile for the next crop.

Any time after a week or ten days after the stalk cutter had been used, they could address the second problem: transforming a field of rows into a flat, evenly cultivated state. They had several different combinations of procedures to accomplish this. One way was to use a large gang disk (sometimes spelled disc). This was a series of 24 inch concave metal disks with a strong metal bar through their centers. The disks were spaced eight to twelve inches apart. Each bar and its disks were called a gang. Four of these gangs were arranged on a strong metal frame, two in the front and two in the back. The two front gangs were set at perhaps 15 degree opposing angles so that as the tractor pulled the gang disk forward, the left front gang bit into the dirt and turned it outward to the left, while the right front gang turned dirt outward to the right. Each rear gang was positioned at an angle opposite the angle of the gang in front of it, cutting into the dirt again and turning it back inward toward the center.

These gang disks could have weights of rocks, sacks of dirt, or anything placed in trays on top so the disks would cut deeper into the soil. When the gang disk was pulled down a row or two or three, the end result was a leveling of the rows and the middles between the rows. For good measure, sometimes they disked a field first in the same direction as the rows, then disked it at a ninety degree angle to the first disking. These gang disks evolved from smaller and lighter units which a couple of mules pulled, to huge and heavy units which required large tractors to pull. The smaller disks cut into the ground only two or three inches, but the larger ones cut as deep as eight or nine inches. Any kind of disk cut deeper in soft and slightly moist ground than in hard dry ground. As always the farmer watched weather conditions closley and hoped to be able to disk at the most effective time.

Another kind of plow was the turning plow, or bottom plow. This plow had a sharp tooth or coulter that cut into the ground at the front, and a wing or moldboard out to one side only. As this type of plow was pulled through the ground it had the effect of turning the topsoil under and bringing to the surface that soil which had been a few inches down in the ground. These types of plows also evolved from a single small plow pulled by a mule to much larger muliple plows configured together and pulled by powerful tractors. Smaller plows cut into the ground only three or four inches. Larger ones could cut as deep as 12 inches depending on the type of soil.

After tobacco season was over, a typical field cultivation might be to run the stalk cutter as soon as possible after the tobacco priming was all finished. In the winter they disked the field. In early spring they used either a turning plow or the largest gang disk available, followed by a subsoiler, followed by disking again. The field was then ready to be prepared as required for any specific crop.

The harrow was an implement used as the last preparation of land before sowing wheat, oats, or other seed that were broadcast rather than placed in rows. The harrow was a series of iron bars with spikes attached at a 90 degree angle to the bars. Only the spikes touched the ground, their tops leaning slightly forward. As a mule or tractor pulled the harrow forward, perhaps 50 or 100 of these spikes were dragged across the ground, breaking up clods, leveling, and leaving a surface smoother and softer to receive the seed. As with other farm implements, mules and horses first pulled small harrows; increasingly larger harrows are pulled by increasingly larger and more powerful farm tractors.

Pictures can show and words can describe, but there's no way to convey the unique smells on a tobacco farm: fresh plowed land, sweaty mules, tobacco curing in the barn, or the pit.

Tobacco Farming Today

Tobacco farming evolves quickly. The one horse turning plow has been made obsolete by the tractor pulling 20 turning plows. Seed varieties change every year. Plants now are raised in green houses rather than in tobacco plant beds. The use of chemicals and mechanization of the various processes have brought tobacco farming to the point that few if any workers ever get tobacco gum thick on their hands. Combines have been modified to prime the tobacco so that primers and slide trucks are things of the past. Tobacco varieties are engineered to ripen more uniformly so the tobacco harvester can get one third of the leaves or even half of them with each pass.

Toward the end of the twentieth century tobacco farmers stopped tying the cured tobacco into bundles for market. They also stopped grading the leaves. After curing they stripped it off the sticks, dumped all the leaves together in a pile on a large burlap sheet made by sewing together four fertilizer bags. They tied the four corners together on top, piled the tied sheets on trucks and trailors, and went off to market. By skipping the grading and tying into bundles, some farmers took the last of their tobacco to market just a couple weeks after the last barn was cured. It used to take Papa two to three months after curing, to get the last of his crop to market.

At one point in the late twentieth century harvesters dumped hundreds of pounds of tobacco leaves in metal bins about eight feet long, wide, and tall. They took the bins to bulk barns where they rolled them in on rails with two or three other identical bins. The bulk barns were also metal, constructed to the precise size needed for its specified number of bins. They inserted metal rods at intervals through the bins so that air could circulate rather than the tobacco settling down on itself and beginning to rot. At one end of the barn, gas or electricity produced heat that was circulated through by a huge powerful fan at the other end.

Each of these tobacco farming techniques and all of them together have been revolutionized several times since Papa farmed tobacco in the mid twentieth century. Nothing is done now like it was done then.

Cultivation also is very different. A mule or horse used to pull a single plow doing little more than scratching the surface of a small area measured in inches. Now huge air conditioned tractors pull huge plows cultivating at whatever depth the farmer desires across an area measured in feet or yards.

Family farms are a thing of the past in Wake County. Almost all the children I went to school with grew up on family farms. Their parents were farmers altogether, or worked public jobs and farmed on the side, or were tenant farmers. Today in Wake County no one raises a family by farming 148 acres (the size of Papa's farm then) without another job of some kind. People with college degrees manage huge farms and/or rent several farms. The people who make farming happen today are managers and administrators rather than what we used to call farmers.

Tobacco itself is in less demand. Farmers are switching to grain crops like corn and soy beans, or sweet potatoes.

Change in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It is interesting, sad in a way, and yet still uplifting in a way to recall how Papa raised and marketed his tobacco crop.

Edwin Ray Frazier, September, 2010

Several books previewed on this website are available on line;
Or you may send the purchase price plus $4.00 shipping and handling to:
Edwin Ray Frazier, 4202 Appleton Way, Wilmington, NC 28412
Questions? email: edrafr9@gmail.com phone: 910-232-1258
Thank you.