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A Year ’Round Job: Raising Tobacco in Jefferson Township  Woodrow Wolf was born in 1912 on a farm on Mile Road in Jefferson Township. On their eighty-acre farm, the Wolfs raised cows, hogs, corn, wheat, apples- everything that they needed to provide for their large family. Their main cash crop was cigar tobacco, an important crop in Montgomery County until the 1930’s when the growing popularity of cigarettes caused the demand for cigars to diminish. A year-round, labor intensive crop, tobacco provided much of the cash needed to support their family of five children. In the following account, Woodrow Wolf recalls the hard work of tobacco production.  ou start tobacco about the middle of March. [The] tobacco beds were about eight feet across and we always had about seventy feet of tobacco beds. And early in the spring, before you got ready to plant your tobacco seed, you’d have the steam engine come in, and they’d come in and drop a pan down on your tobacco bed and steam the ground to kill all the weed seeds. So after you got your tobacco beds steamed, you let the ground cool off and then about the twentieth of March, you’d plant your tobacco seed in these tobacco beds. “And then you had a canvas that fit on the bed. It stays warm in there when the sun shines and then your tobacco seeds come up. You take that canvas off and water them, then you put the canvas back on. By June you can leave the canvas off pretty nearly all the time. But then you have to water those plants. We had to do it (with) a barrel and a sprinkling can and then water those plants. And then when those plants were about six—eight inches tall, then you’d get the land out in the field ready.” “In the meantime, you had to pull the plants and have them all in boxes. And then you’d go out there and you’d plant maybe ten, twelve rows a day. A tobacco planter was a three-wheel affair. It had two big wheels on the back and a little bitty wheel out in the front. And between the two big wheels in the back and the wheel out in front there was a big fifty, seventy-five gallon water barrel. You had two people setting on the back of the planter and you set right down on the ground. The wheel in front of the tobacco planter smashed the ground down flat. Then what we called the “shoe” cut the ground open so that you could stick the plant in. There was a trip on the water, and you held a plant there until the water came, and then you planted the plant.” “The next morning after you got the tobacco planted, you plowed to cut that dirt up around the plant and made sure that all of them was all right. And some of them would die and we would replant. You kept the ground real loose all the time around those plants and you [had to be] sure it didn’t have any weeds. So then you had to go out there with a hoe and hoe.” “And in the meantime, why, the tobacco worms would come. Tobacco worms get as big around as your finger. And we had five kids in the family and my dad didn’t believe in killing them with poison. And so we’d hunt tobacco worms the same time as we’d hoe. And you had to worm the tobacco pretty nearly every three or four days.” “About the last week in August, your tobacco would be up maybe three feet and have a lot of leaves on it. In order to make your leaves grow bigger, you’d have to top it. And then because you took the top off, a little sucker comes out. There’d be three of them on top and then maybe eight or ten more down on the leaves as you went down the plant. And so when you’d get ready to take the tobacco in, you gotta go out and sucker that tobacco. And then you let the tobacco stand for about another week and then you cut it.” “You’d cut maybe ten rows and let it wilt out in the field. So then you go out with a horse and wagon and pick those tobacco stalks up and throw it up on that wagon. Course, they’re wilted so you don’t break the leaves off. So you bring that wilted tobacco into the shed and you put them in the holder. And then you had a metal spear that would go on the end of the lath and then you’d spear that tobacco onto this lath, and then when you got a pile of them, then you’d hang it up in the barn or in the shed until it got dry. And of course, you were cutting tobacco from about the first week in September til sometimes October the 1st. In the meantime, why the tobacco was hanging there and was drying out.” “And then when the tobacco got all yellow-colored, maybe the first of December, it was ready to strip. At the end of each one of those sheds, we had what we called a ‘strip house.’ But before [you could strip it], you had to wait until the tobacco came ‘in case.’ When it would rain and there would be a lot of moisture in the air, then that moisture would collect in the tobacco leaves, and that’s what we called ’ ‘in case.’” “And so, we’d maybe take down fifty rails of tobacco and lay it out and cover it so that it wouldn’t dry out. Then we’d start stripping tobacco. You’d pull off about twenty-five leaves off the tobacco stem and put them in your hand and then you’d take one leaf and tie it around the butt end of the leaf, and that was what we called a ‘hand.’” “And so, you’d leave them lay on the bench until you got a whole bunch of them and then you’d take these ‘hands,’ and you’d knead them into a ‘strip box’–you’d put pressure on it, stand on it, or put weight on it–in layers until the box was full. And you went all through the winter stripping fifty rails of this and fifty raisl of that. You stripped tobacco all winter. A lot of times we’d stay over there at night and strip tobacco. And when we got it all stripped, it was usually about February.” “Then the tobacco buyer would come around and you sold your tobacco. After you make a deal with him, then they sent boxes about five feet square and we’d start shaking the tobacco up, and then knead it back into these boxes we were going to sell it in. And we put about 350 pounds into a box. And we had what they call a ‘tobacco press.’ You had to do some real squeezing to get 350 pounds into one of those boxes. Once we got it pressed down in there, then right real quick we’d nail the lid on so it would stay in the box.” “And then we usually sold the tobacco to some people down in Germantown. Germantown was a big tobacco area and was full of tobacco warehouses. You’d get your tobacco sold maybe in February or the first part of March. And by the time you got that crop sold, why, you was steaming your beds for the next year. So it’s a year around job of tobacco business.” From the Miami Valley Oral History Project. Courtesy of Claudia Watson. BACK TO TOP |
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Cutting time in tobacco field |
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