Episode 123
Hot Topic—Fire-Cured Tobacco Farming in Tennessee | Jennifer Davis | Box Press Ep. 123
Learn about the sweat equity that goes into fire-curing tobacco for cigars. See baby tobacco plants grow and mature. And hear how a tobacco plant becomes cigar ready in this field trip to a tobacco farm on the central northern border of Tennessee with cigar connoisseur Rob Gagner and Tennessee realtor/historian Jennifer Davis.
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00:00 This is Box Press
00:17 How tobacco seeds are started
00:30 What do tobacco seeds look like?
00:38 How do you plant tobacco?
00:49 Staking fresh tobacco leaves
01:21 See inside a fire-cured tobacco barn in Tennessee
03:05 Every piece of wood holds generations of memories
03:56 You're not a man until you've had a man's **** in your face
04:17 See where tobacco was processed and auctioned off
05:45 Loose leaf floors are now full of antiques bought with tobacco money
Transcript
- Little baby tobacco!
Speaker:- Absolutely.
Speaker:This is the more modern
way of starting plants.
Speaker:In the old times, they would
start these in the ground
Speaker:in plant beds.
Speaker:- Are these floating?
Speaker:- So these are absolutely floating.
Speaker:They're floating in trays.
Speaker:They have like a great
root system on them.
Speaker:- Holy cow!
Speaker:- And what they're trying to do
Speaker:is to get the roots to develop
before the plants develop.
Speaker:It's kind of like planting spinach.
Speaker:Really soft soil, and they
plant each individual seed,
Speaker:and each tobacco seeds about
the size of a poppy seed,
Speaker:they're just tiny, tiny, tiny.
Speaker:Each individual plant is pulled out,
Speaker:put in the ground by hand.
Speaker:They plow down the middle
to keep the weeds out.
Speaker:Then they chopped out between the plants,
Speaker:and they might do that two or three times.
Speaker:And then, they top it,
Speaker:they put the sucker oil that goes down
Speaker:that'll keep the suckers from coming off.
Speaker:They cut every one of
these plants by hand,
Speaker:and then they lay it on
the ground, they pile it.
Speaker:And then, each individual
plant is spiked onto a stick.
Speaker:And then, each one of those sticks
Speaker:is picked up and put
onto a scaffold wagon.
Speaker:And then, they're unloaded
from the scaffold wagon
Speaker:into the barn.
Speaker:And then, they're taken out of the barn
Speaker:and taken off the stick
and put on a flat wagon.
Speaker:And then, the flat wagon is
taken to the stripping room,
Speaker:and then each individual
leaf is picked off.
Speaker:So just a little bit of labor involved.
Speaker:This is a fire-cured tobacco barn.
Speaker:Before you could just go
to Lowe's or Home Depot
Speaker:and buy lumber that was cut,
Speaker:you know, and you could butt it together
Speaker:and it would be smooth.
Speaker:You had to have some kind of
way to fill up the cracks.
Speaker:If you put sawdust and then slabs,
Speaker:and you have one little poof of air,
Speaker:you have all of this plant material
Speaker:in this big, wooden barn,
Speaker:and it just goes poof, and it burns up.
Speaker:The slabs that they use
to fire the tobacco barn
Speaker:are the scraps that it took
from when they make the barn.
Speaker:And the way the fire goes
Speaker:is they put the slabs down,
and they lay 'em long ways.
Speaker:And then, they put sawdust in here,
Speaker:usually about knee deep,
you know, 24 inches deep,
Speaker:and it's a recipe
proprietary to each farmer.
Speaker:And it's only built up to about
the concrete wall down here,
Speaker:because they don't want
it to touch the wood.
Speaker:And then, if you notice when
you look around at eye level,
Speaker:nevermind the door that's
open, at eye level,
Speaker:everything that's eye
level has been sealed shut,
Speaker:so there are no air gaps.
Speaker:But when you look up, they've
left cracks in the barn,
Speaker:because you want the smoke
Speaker:to go all the way to the top and through.
Speaker:So like a chimney will draw,
Speaker:these barns draw
Speaker:so that all the smoke is sucked up
Speaker:all the way through and out.
Speaker:Every tobacco barn has a
pile of tobacco sticks.
Speaker:And the stalk goes on here,
Speaker:and then it hangs across these tiers,
Speaker:and you can tell the age of the sticks.
Speaker:This has been milled in a modern sawmill.
Speaker:You can see the saw blades down the side.
Speaker:When you get in these older tobacco barns,
Speaker:it's usually fat on one end,
Speaker:pointy on the other end.
Speaker:It was split out with a knife.
Speaker:Some of these sticks
have been in the barns
Speaker:since the barns were built.
Speaker:Every person in the family,
for maybe 100 years,
Speaker:has handled the stick,
Speaker:because they put it in
the field, put it up,
Speaker:take it down, back and forth.
Speaker:So if there's a such
thing as a piece of wood
Speaker:that like holds a memory,
Speaker:it's like you're literally
holding the blood and sweat
Speaker:of all the people that came before you
Speaker:that were in this tobacco barn.
Speaker:When they hang tobacco in the barn,
Speaker:you have to climb up in there.
Speaker:So you have like a stick
that's 100 pounds or so,
Speaker:and you have to hand it up to the person,
Speaker:because their feet are
gonna be right there,
Speaker:and they do it when it's the
hottest part of the summer.
Speaker:So you're in this barn, that's
not very well ventilated,
Speaker:it's really hot and you've been outside,
Speaker:and always heard that you're not a man
Speaker:until you've had another
man's ball sweat in your face,
Speaker:because it's just, you know, gravity.
Speaker:You're standing straddle leg up there,
Speaker:you know, when you reach up,
Speaker:you're gonna get a big eyeball of sweat.
Speaker:- And that's great.
Speaker:Thank you to those that
have sacrificed so lovingly.
Speaker:- There were literally
millions of pounds of tobacco
Speaker:that were being produced
Speaker:just to supply a little
bitty, tiny Springfield.
Speaker:When we were walking around,
Speaker:you could see these
buildings are not small,
Speaker:maybe there's 35, 40 of them in town,
Speaker:and this was the economics.
Speaker:And if you can imagine,
Speaker:all of the tobacco that
was sold in these buildings
Speaker:was grown within 50 miles.
Speaker:- All the tobacco would then be outside?
Speaker:- They would put it in a big line,
Speaker:and then they would come by
and they would auction it off.
Speaker:And on one side of the row
would be the auctioneer,
Speaker:and on the other side of the row
Speaker:would be the tobacco buyers.
Speaker:It's like makers of chocolate or,
Speaker:you know, like other fine foods,
Speaker:like artisan kinds of things,
Speaker:it's like, it's a process,
Speaker:it takes generations to learn how to do,
Speaker:and it takes years to master.
Speaker:Let's say if they get 40 good crops,
Speaker:so you've learned, you know,
Speaker:like through your
grandparents or your parents,
Speaker:and then you get to be
20, well, when you're 20,
Speaker:they're not gonna turn
over the farm to you.
Speaker:When you're 30, until the time you're 70,
Speaker:that's all you have to
like master your craft.
Speaker:Now we're at the point
where the 70-year-olds,
Speaker:their grandchildren and their children
Speaker:are working off the farm.
Speaker:Unless somebody documents it
right now like how to do this,
Speaker:it's gonna be like blacksmithing,
Speaker:but that knowledge that's been passed on,
Speaker:for hundreds of years, is
fixing to like just disappear.
Speaker:When you think about like
all of these things in here,
Speaker:and like a lot of them
came from the Midwest
Speaker:or the Rust Belt.
Speaker:As we moved into an Industrial Revolution
Speaker:where they had more
production in the North
Speaker:and the raw materials were
coming from the South,
Speaker:whether it was cotton, or tobacco,
Speaker:or sugar, or iron ore,
or coal from Kentucky,
Speaker:and the whiskey and the cigars,
Speaker:and the raw materials that were
used to generate that wealth
Speaker:were coming from here.
Speaker:You'd always see the
guys sitting at the bar,
Speaker:drinking their whiskey,
Speaker:stirring their whiskey with their cigar,
Speaker:and these great, lavish houses.
Speaker:It's really a full circle
when you think about it,
Speaker:that you're in this building
Speaker:full of things that were
purchased by wealthy people
Speaker:in a loose floor that is no longer.
Speaker:So it's like literally an
artifact in an artifact,
Speaker:and it really tells the story
of culturally what's happening
Speaker:without ever saying food or tobacco.
Speaker:It's just the story of people.
Speaker:- Right.
- Mhmm.
Speaker:It's like what do we value in our lives?
Speaker:I mean, it's like, you know, chandeliers,
Speaker:and glass lamps, and art,
Speaker:and furniture, and all of the things,
Speaker:ironically enough, stored
at a tobacco loose floor.
