My Grandpa Vestal was a farmer. He inherited a portion of his father’s land, who inherited a portion of his father’s land. In 1939, about six years after he and Grandma married, they built their one-story white frame farmhouse, and gradually added all kinds of farm buildings. A traditional barn with a hayloft, where the milk cow and Kate the mule were sheltered. A stretched oblong chicken house where Grandma would collect eggs* every morning. A shed that sheltered Grandpa’s tractor and yellow Ford pick-up truck. A small shelter in the pig sty. A pack house where the tobacco was hung, and the hams cured. And at the bottom of the hill, just before the creek, two tobacco barns.
Until I was three and a half years old, I stayed with my grandparents all day while my parents worked; and after that, still often throughout my childhood and beyond; so many of my earliest and fondest memories are on those grounds, sacred to my soul. I jumped into raked piles of leaves with cousins, snapped peas and green beans on the wrap-around front porch with my grandma, ate apples that had fallen from the apple trees and grapes off the small vine in the backyard, found “treasures” with my grandma on the walk to the barns (broken shards of pottery, pop bottle caps, and other items of immense childhood value), screamed hysterically when the rooster flogged my little sister, and held my grandma’s hand in amazement when she would walk me down to the pig sty to see the new baby piglets and warn me not to get close enough to the fence to threaten the sow.
In the vegetable garden, there were corn, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, peas, squash, cucumbers, beets, onions, cabbage, lettuce, and who knows what that I’ve forgotten. Grandma’s cream corn, fried squash, and blackberry pie are still some of my most delicious memories. Grandma always had a flower garden too, near the house. And the cash crops on the farm were soybeans and tobacco.
The first tobacco barn at the bottom of the hill is central in my early summertime memories. Early in the morning the men and boys would go to the field, and the women and girls to the barn. The men primed the tobacco, removing the large gummy tobacco leaves from the stalk and placing them into sleds, long wooden crates pulled behind the tractor, two at a time, from the field to the barn. At the barn, the men would quickly pile the leaves onto the rustic table-like structure, then head back to the field for more. The women would then tie the leaves quickly and methodically to specially crafted wooden sticks by which they would be hung from the barn rafters to cure, to dry out.
All morning the men would work in the hot field, and the women would work at the barn. Then around noon, everyone would go to the house, wash up using homemade lye soap to scrub the stubborn tobacco gum from our hands, and hungrily devour a huge dinner (the meals were called breakfast, dinner, and supper), prepared by Grandma, all from scratch. Far too incredible to be imagined unless you’ve had the experience. Then the workers returned to the sweltering hot work for the afternoon. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon Grandpa would show up in the field and at the barn with nabs, bottled pop, and other break snacks from Joe Reece’s little store across the road.
My earliest memories at the barn are twofold. One, grandma would spread a “pallet” within her sight but out of the way of the workers, for me to sit and play. A “pallet” was usually one of her handmade quilts, given in those days no special honor but used for anything from sitting in the grass, to covering a load of something being hauled in the back of the pick-up, to piling on the bed for warmth in days before indoor heat.
Second, I must have been about three years old when Grandpa gave me my first paying job. Most likely to entertain me and keep me within eyeshot, more than for the actual help. I think I was paid 10c a day for laying a new stick across the wooden stringer every time either of the stringers completed a string of leaves.
The excitement to the hard and hot work was the not so unusual big fat green tobacco worm on the leaves, and the thankfully less usual black snake found hanging in the rafters of the barn as the men hung the tobacco, probably there to prey on birds, owls, or rats.
Maybe a couple of years later, after my sister was born and my mom had quit work to stay home with us, she would go to work at the barn and take us along. I slowly graduated to handing. Handing meant quickly gathering a bundle of tobacco leaves by their stems, and handing them, one handful after another, to the stringer, the person tying the bundles together on the stick. To my memory, I never got fast enough to be a regular hand, but filled in occasionally if we were short handed. I’m not sure my memory is correct, but I’m thinking 50c an hour might have been the pay for handing, or maybe that was my lesser pay?
Neighbors and extended family would come together to get the work done, including what they called “swapping.” My grandpa’s brother-in-law, Aldon Brown, also raised tobacco, and the two families “swapped,” meaning three days a week they all worked Grandpa’s tobacco, and the alternating three days they all worked Aldon’s tobacco, with no pay.
This was the generation before me, when the tobacco land was still owned by my great grandpa. At that time, Grandpa rented about five acres of land from my great grandpa, with my great grandpa getting one third of the profits. Another three or four acres were rented to Will Boles, with my great grandpa getting 50% of the profits because he also provided the farm equipment and the fertilizer.
Over the years, Grandpa “swapped” with several black families - Boles, Scales, Cundiff . . . sometimes more than one at a time, depending on the number of family members being swapped. In the Boles family, there was only Will and his son, so only two family members were needed for that “swap.” My mom has a memory of helping at a black family’s barn and one of the men offering everybody homemade peach brandy. This would’ve been in the 1960s.
In addition to the “swapping,” other hands would be hired for pay. I remember as an elementary age child, many boys my age and several stay-at-home moms would work in tobacco for daily hire.
Tobacco setting time was around the end of April or the first of May, after the threat of frost was past. Setting, which is tobacco language for planting, only required two people to sit in the setter, pulled by the tractor and facing the field behind, and one to drive the tractor. I remember doing this at least once, setting with Grandma as Grandpa drove. I must have been about three, so maybe was again less helpful than I imagined myself then.
Tobacco priming started with the bottom leaves, gradually working upward until at the end of the season all the leaves had been removed. Besides priming, field work included topping, which meant taking the bloom off the top of the stalk, as the bloom would take the nutrients needed for the healthy growth of the leaves. Then suckering, for the same purpose. Sometimes the job was worming. If not removed, the fat green worms would grow long and quickly devour all the leaves.
My daddy tells the childhood story of Grandpa one day offering him a penny for every tobacco worm he could bring him from the field. Daddy set out with a peck basket and returned with hundreds of worms. Grandpa was astonished but gave him his dollars. Worms were then fed to the chickens.
Another of my daddy’s tobacco worm stories is that they usually pinched the worms’ heads off to kill them, and that sometimes to prove their toughness, boys would bite the heads off. “I wouldn’t have married someone who did that,” my mom responded, to which my daddy said, “You did.”
Tobacco had to hang in the barn to dry out and cure, because moisture would cause mold. Then five or six times a year, the soft brown cured tobacco would be bundled and taken to sell, most often to Winston-Salem, sometimes to Mt. Airy, or occasionally when cash was needed earlier, to Fairmont or Lumberton. At these warehouses, various buyers, like RJ Reynolds, would be present to bid on the piles. “Piles” could be up to 300 pounds. Transporting to sell was another opportunity for neighbors to make a little money, if they had a truck big enough to transport the tobacco. Grandpa would ride along. Tobacco priming usually ended about September, and the final selling then.
I asked my daddy about the sleds that were pulled by the tractor from the fields to the barns. I knew they didn’t have wheels. Did they have runners? They were tapered like runners, he said, so when they hit something they could keep going. And they were also hand made - remade or at least repaired every year, so there were six to eight ready for the season.
Daddy says today tobacco farming is not done by small-time farmers but as larger industrial operations, and no one uses these old methods anymore. Thus my tobacco barn memories from the 1960s are a gummy leaf of history.
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*In the generation before mine, when my daddy was a boy, he got the egg money. He would walk to Fred Key's store where he could sell a cake of butter or a half dozen eggs for 25c. Then he would walk to the movie theatre where he could get a movie and popcorn. Popcorn was 10c, and a movie was 15c except on Wednesday nights when the movie was 9c. This would've been the 1940s-1950s.
photo credit: my own photo close-up of Cotton Ketchie's "Tobacco Row"
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