Raising Tobacco

                                     

                           Nancy Middleton Smith and Dave Smith

                                       in front of their tobacco crop

       

                           Alta Allen Cantrell in the tobacco field

So a couple years back, I went to visit Mom and Dad. It was a rather chilly, dreary November day with a spitting rain. I asked Dad what his family would have been doing on a day like that day back when he was a boy. Dad said that they would have probably been stripping tobacco. Mom agreed that the day was a good tobacco stripping day.

Well, both sides of my family lived in eastern Kentucky. Mom left when her mother died to go to Dayton, Ohio to live with her aunt; but Dad’s family lived on Anglin Branch in Owsley County, Kentucky. Grandpa and Grandma Smith lived there for many years before they, in their later years, moved to Ohio to stay with their daughter’s family.

We used to visit Grandma and Grandpa on Anglin Branch as often as we could. I was very familiar with the sight of white canvas-covered tobacco beds that would later result in patches of huge-leafed tobacco.

While I was familiar with tobacco, I myself have never worked in tobacco and when Dad told me they would probably be stripping tobacco on a day like today, my curiosity got the best of me. I had to know about stripping tobacco and of course, that led to what happened before and after the stripping.

So I peppered Dad with questions. When I didn’t understand something he said, I kept asking more questions to clarify. I think that Dad became frustrated with my follow-up questioning, which must have seemed unending. He did plug on, probably realizing that I had inherited stubborn streaks from both him and Mom. So I am gonna try to record what I think that “I learned”.

Dad and Mom both indicated that a tobacco crop was pretty much a year-round process and parts of that process could make a body bone-weary tired. As I said, I never worked tobacco and I think that I am quite content to live with only second-hand knowledge of it.

Now many folks in Kentucky grew tobacco. I remember seeing tobacco beds, tobacco patches and barns filled with hanging tobacco all over the countryside when we used to visit Grandpa and Grandma. You can still see tobacco crops nowadays, but there seems to be fewer and fewer of them.

Tobacco was a good crop to provide families some cash money. Our family didn’t require too much cash as they were able to grow, raise, hunt and forage for most of their necessities for survival. Cash did come in handy to purchase those things that they could not grow; coffee, sugar, flour….. Tobacco was a good crop to provide that cash.

Now, folks could not just decide to grow tobacco and start growing it. You had to have permission to grow it and you were given a limit, or a base, of how much you could grow. At first, the base was limited by acreage. More recently, it would be limited by poundage.

There were folks who drove around the countryside making sure that folks were not growin’ more acreage than they had been allotted. If too many acres had been planted, the excess would be cut down by these folks. Uncle Gayle Smith did this job at some time in the past. I imagine that he was an excellent choice for this job as he seemed to know everyone in the county and in surrounding counties, as well. He was well-liked too, which probably could not hurt in having a job like his. It might have been harder for a farmer to be too mad at a friendly face, even when that friendly face was chopping down his tobacco plants!

So, after a person was given their quota or base, they could prepare a bed to start their plants. They would pile some old branches over the bed and burn it off. The ash would help the soil and hopefully, the weeds would be burnt off.

Now Dad says that they would probably start the seeds sometime in February or March. After the bed had been prepared, the seeds were planted. Supports were placed across the bed so that canvas could be stretched across the bed and stay up off of the ground and off of the plants. This canvas protected the young plants from freezes as they emerged from the ground.

                                Canvas-covered seedling beds,

After the young plants were a couple inches tall, the canvas would be rolled back and the plants would be sprinkled with a solution of water and “soda” which was some type of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The plants would then be sprinkled with plain water to wash the soda off of the leaves and into the ground. If the soda remained on the leaves, it would burn them and that is why it had to be rinsed off. The canvas would then be rolled back over the bed.

Now sometime after the threat of frost was over, the canvas would be rolled off of the bed for good. The tender young plants would be allowed to toughen up for two or three days in the sun. Meanwhile, the tobacco patch had been prepared.

I can remember Gpa or Uncle Gayle walking behind the mule-drawn plow as the soil was prepared for planting. When the ground was ready, the young plants would be pulled from their bed and transplanted into the base. If it was really dry when the plants were pulled, the soil of the bed would be watered so that the young plants could be pulled up without damaging them.

Dad’s family did not have any fancy planters. If the ground was moist, Dad would take a tobacco stick or his hand, poke a hole in the earth, put the young plant in the hole, water it a bit, and then recover the hole. If it was dry, a hoe was used to chop a hole into the ground, the plant was added with some water and the soil was pulled back around the plant. This process was continued until plants had been transplanted within the acreage allowed.

The plants would grow in their patch. I can remember how dark and rich the soil looked at Grandpa and Grandma’s place. That soil was great for the tobacco, but it was great for the weeds as well. The tobacco patch had to be hoed so that weeds wouldn’t overrun the plants. The base was diligently hoed until the plants grew large enough to smother out the weeds. Then they did not have to be hoed so much. Tobacco worms had to be picked off of the leaves to keep them from destroying their cash crop.

  

      Tobacco in the field and the tobacco barn just waiting the crop!


                           

                                  Tobacco growing in the field.


In my mind, I can almost picture those large green leaves swaying as a cooling summer storm blows through.

After the tobacco began to bloom, the plants were topped. This involved cutting the flowering tops off and allowed nutrients that would have gone towards blooms to go to the leaves. Very quickly, small sprouts would begin to grow from around the stem where it was topped. Dad’s family would have to go through the base pulling these suckers off. That allowed the base of the plant to spread out and the leaves to receive all of the nutrients from the soil.

About 3-4 weeks after topping, sometime around August-September, the tobacco plants would begin to ripen. The large broad leaves would begin to turn golden yellow from the base on up to the top. When the crop was ripe, it was ready for harvest.

Tobacco sticks would be carried out onto the base. A stick would be stuck upright into the soil and a sharp, removable spear tip would be stuck on top. The tobacco plant would be cut near the ground and the plant would be pierced onto the tobacco stick near that cut end. Four-six plants would be cut and speared onto the same stick. The spear tip would be removed and the tobacco stick would remain standing upright in the field with its “stringer” of tobacco plants attached. This process would continue over and over until the base was covered with upright tobacco sticks with their speared tobacco plants.


                              


The plants would stay like this in the field for two to three days until they had dried or wilted a bit. Then the sticks of speared tobacco would be pulled from the ground, loaded and carried into the tobacco barn where the sticks were laid across the supports built below the roofline just for this purpose. There they would remain until they dried.


                           

I can remember walking past Grandpa’s tobacco barn on the way to the outhouse. In my mind, I can see that tobacco hanging from the rafters, making the barn opening look like a giant half-closed eye.


                                



                                 


So, on a day, cool and damp, like today, Dad’s family would likely have been in the tobacco barn stripping the leaves from the cut tobacco stalks. Dad says that it had to be cool and damp. If it wasn’t damp, the tobacco leaves would be too fragile and just disintegrate into pieces as they were stripped from the stalks. When the tobacco leaves were soft and pliable from the dampness in the air, they were said to be “in case”.

The tobacco had to be graded during the stripping process. Dad remembers there being four grades, plus a category they called tips. The grades were determined by the color of the leaves. Dad’s family would form an assembly line during this stage of working tobacco. There would be four or five people in the line, one for each of the grades. Each person would strip the leaves from the stalk of their grade and then hand it off to the person responsible for the next grade. The tips category would include the tips of the stalk, as well as any leaves that may have been damaged.

As the tobacco leaves were stripped from the stalk, they would be held together in one hand. Leaves of the same grade would be added to the already stripped leaves until the base of the clump of leaves was about two inches in diameter. Then the base of the bundle, or hand, was bound together with a twisted tobacco leaf used as a tie. The leaves were spread and then draped over a tobacco stick. When the stick was full of these draped hands, the tobacco would be pressed in a tobacco press.

The tobacco press that Dad’s family used was made from planks. It was kind of like a large book with the pages removed. There was a spine that would accommodate the thickness of the tobacco stick. The tobacco stick would be laid across the “back cover” of the book/press. The front cover was pulled down over the tobacco stick with its attached hands of tobacco. Weights could be placed on top of the “front cover” so that the tobacco could be pressed even better. This stick would remain in the press until more tobacco was stripped, made into hands, and draped over another stick until it was full. Then the pressed stick of hands would be removed, stacked in a pile according to grade and covered while the new stick of hands was pressed. The process was repeated until all of the tobacco crop had been pressed.


                         

                                          Old tobacco press.


When all of the tobacco had been pressed, it could be loaded up, careful to keep grades separated, and taken to market. If the market wasn’t open, the covered tobacco would have to remain in the barn until it was. Taking it to market involved loading it on a truck and carrying it to Richmond, Winchester or Lexington. Dad says at one time, one of the largest tobacco markets in the world was Penn Brothers in Lexington.

Dad says that they would drive into the huge tobacco warehouse and wait until their turn. Someone would come to their truck and they would hand their tobacco off to the warehouse worker. They would hold the stick and the warehouse worker would pull off the hands into large flat baskets with lips that curved up around the edges. After all of the tobacco was handed off and placed in the baskets, separated by grades, they would receive a receipt.

Dad says that their tobacco was never auctioned on the day they took it in. They would return home and wait for a check for their crop to come through the mail.

I can imagine Grandpa, Grandma and their children waiting for the money the family would receive for their hard work. I can imagine them hoping that their tobacco would bring a good price. It would be close to Christmas. Christmas was not a big thing for them back at that time, but I imagine they may have thought about some special little treat wanted for Christmas. Perhaps, they had hoped that a small part of that money might go to that special treat.


                                         

After they received the money, I imagine that Grandpa went to the general store and bought coffee, big bags of flour and meal, a bag of sugar and other little things that they could not produce themselves. And close to Christmas, I can imagine him using some of the ‘baccer money he had set aside to pick out several big juicy oranges and some hard candies to put in stockings for Christmas mornin’!