Tobacco from the Window of Big Mill Country Inn
Oct 17th 2008ChloeOn the Farm
Summer nights bring back memories of childhood on the farm. You could heard the frogs, the crickets and you could smell the tobacco curing. It was a sweet, wonderful smell not at all like the smell associated with cigarette smoke. I can still look out the window and see tobacco growing.
You can too, if you visit Big Mill Bed and Breakffast or eastern North Carolina in spring, summer or fall. Tobacco is a beautiful, stately plant with sticky, pink flowers.
In years past, come January the tiny seeds were sewn in beds that were then covered with cheese cloth. In May these plants were pulled and planted one at a time in rows in the fields that were "set off" with 8 rows and then a wider truck row. This was done so that when it was time to "pull or prime" the tobacco there would be room for the mule and the tobacco truck. We don’t "pick" tobacco.
This truck was a wooden cart with wooden wheels and it was pulled by a mule. Later tractors did this job.
Pictured above are Mother, Monk, Sammy and our wonderful mule Mary. Mary lived to be 40 years old and spent her whole life here at Big Mill. Her room is being renovated for a Writer’s Retreat here at Big Mill Bed and Breakfast and we are calling it the Mule Shed.
Above: Nephew Monk is piled up (as we say in the South) in a tobacco truck full of green tobacco.
Left: My cousin Jean Carol and Aunt Effie in the late forties. (I assume that is true because Aunt Effie is wearing her Army uniform).
After it was piled into the tobacco truck, the tobacco was carried to the "scaffold" and looped onto sticks. The looped tobacco was poked up into the barn and dried with a wood fire; later it was flue-cured. It was then removed from the sticks, graded and tied into pretty bundles, ready for market.
In late August the tobacco was taken to the warehouse to be auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder. My dad owned one of these warehouses The Roanoke Dixie.
Wow, that was a fun place for a child to play.
(Above) That is my dad Ops (back view) wearing the hat. It seems that he has stopped the sale and is probably asking the tobacco buyer for a better price. The fellow on the left has walked over from Griffin’s Quick Lunch, just across the street. Griffin’s is still in business and they still sell Martin County barbecue.
This is how tobacco is harvested now, we aren’t Tobacco Road anymore. The warehouses are a thing of the past…the tobacco companies buy the tobacco right out of the field. That is sad; some of the art is lost. Oh, well….it is still a beautiful crop. Some day we will find the perfect use for tobacco.
By the way, I have never smoked a cigarette, or dipped or chewed…but I did make myself a snuff brush out of a dogwood twig. And I saw on the internet how to make your own snuff….hmmm.
6 Comments »
Tobacco Industry News on 16 Apr 2009 at 2:09 am #
Hey Chloe!
Nice work, its rare case where people have the ideas about the life cycle of the tobacoo plant. Its really takes a long time and hard labor to produce tobacco.
Chloe on 16 Apr 2009 at 8:47 am #
Well, it is also good to have someone appreciate our history..thank you.
Donald R Smith on 29 Oct 2009 at 10:32 am #
Your short articles & pics brought back a lot of memories of my teen years in Wayne County, NC during the 1960s. I was a truck driver, driving mules and later, tractors. The act of pulling the leaves off the stalk was called cropping by us. Part of being a truck driver was to harness the mules and to remove those wooden wheels from the trucks, aka wooden trailers, and grease the axles before everyone else arrived to start work. The switch to tractors and ‘trucks’ with automobile tires later on elminated these chores. I still remember the sweet aroma that wafted across the yard when the tobacco had finished curing the barn doors were opened. I also hung the tobacco in barn, a whole barn by myself! They would poke it up to me as they finished a stick and I would hang it on the tiers. Most barns were 18 tiers high, some were 21, and they all had four rooms. I would accompany the first truck in the field so I could estimate how many total sticks there would be. That way, I could divide the number of rooms and tiers so that the sticks could be evenly spaced throughout the barn. This allowed the heat to flow more evenly for curing.
Chloe on 30 Oct 2009 at 1:33 pm #
By your note I can tell you were really there! I still have the old barns but across the area they are disappearing, sad to me. Thanks for your comment. Chloe
Deborah Walston Putnam on 29 Jun 2010 at 12:16 pm #
I'm trying to decorate a table for a church function with the theme of "Tobacco Heritage", and having grown up in Farmville in the 1950's on a tabacco farm– it was a way of life for me. I'm having such a hard time finding anything now–tobacco is so taboo, so it's nice to see others that loved the family way of life and the entire culture that tobacco farming represented. Any pictures of tobacco or snippets of memories from that time would be greatly appreciated. I was glad to see the picture of the tobacco truck, my husband promised to build me a model of one– I just have to show him how they looked ! That's not as easy as it sounds.
Chloe on 29 Jun 2010 at 11:34 pm #
hi, Deborah, some of my favorite tobacco memories are of the mules…we had Mary, Red, Rock and Kit..wonderful creatures. And if you want to use any of my tobacco photos, please feel free to do so.