Tobacco

The white eggs hatch inside the worm and eat it from the inside out

You are close to being my age if you can remember what a tobacco lath with a spear on the end looked like. I doubt that many alive today can pick out a true tobacco barn and if they did would they know why the sides had tall, narrow, doors that opened up and were hooked in the open position on each side.

Stepping inside one of these old tobacco barns the first thing you notice is the giant posts that hold the barn skeleton upright is crisscrossed with rails -- not just any rails but very strong and dried out tobacco rails. Depending on the size of your tobacco harvest those rails might have to be moved back and forth on two levels. The top most level and the one below nearest the bottom of the barn.

Those tobacco rails spanned the width of the barn and the tobacco lath that laid across them was filled with speared-on-the-lath tobacco leaves. And a whole lath about 6 feet long was enough to hold a dozen, or or less, freshly cut tobacco leaves. The whole lath with the leaves was hung up on or across those tobacco rails and left there to dry out.

The green leaf color turned to a cigar brown as it dried out. The tall narrow doors that stood open along the barn sides, circulated fresh air that came into the barn with old air among the leaves drying in the barn.

The only thing I didn’t mention was that tobacco had to have the blossom cut off the main stem to keep it from going to seed. And there were those fat tobacco worms that would ruin a considerable amount of tobacco by eating the leaves.

Some adult was always offering a little kid a quarter if they would just bite the head off the tobacco worm. Some did it and collected the quarter and some didn’t. I didn’t do it and got nothing but I have seen older boys do it without getting a mouth full of green slime.

At least once or twice the entire field was gone over with men carrying hoes and their job was to keep the hoe as sharp as a razor to cut off the many weeds that seemed to grow taller than the tobacco.

Machetes were used to cut the stalk of tobacco off close to the ground. The stalk was the part that was speared and was slid down to the bottom of the tobacco lath.

A wagon load of tobacco, on laths, was a job for a good team of horses to pull up to the tobacco barn where the speared tobacco on the laths was loaded on the tobacco rails in the barn.

The tobacco dried and in the winter, each lath was taken down, brought into the strip shed on the end of the barn — the tobacco was taken off the lath and the leaf was pulled off the stems. The stems were used like sticks of wood to keep the fire going in the little stove in the strip shed.

Leaves were packed in a large wooden box and sold to tobacco buyers who came around to appraise the tobacco farmers had grown on a specific allotted number of acres.