Monday, December 31, 2007

Christmas Barn

It isn't a stable, but a tobacco barn.


In the days when tobacco was a main cash crop (along with cotton), barns were used for curing the leaves. Fires were built to heat the inside of the barn; later it was a gas burner.  The vertical panels (where the wreaths are) served as vents to control the temperature. They opened out at the bottom, held in place by a stick. They also let light in the barn, which generally had no electricity.The floors were sand. The cedar shake roof of this barn had been replaced by tin, as evidenced in the right corner. The tobacco leaves were hung on sticks up in the rows of rafters to dry until papery and golden, which took about a month. This was hot work done in the middle of the summer.  The sun tobacco is for cigarettes and the shade is for cigar wrappers. The cured tobacco was taken down, graded and bundled for auction. Different regions of the country grew different varieties for different purposes and the curing methods also varied. Often the people who worked in the Gadsden County, Florida  and south Georgia fields and barns went to Connecticut to work there also.

In the field, the bottom leaves are called sand leaves because they have sand on them and they are primed (hand picked) first, along with the leaves directly above it that are mature. The rest of the plant is left to grow. The harvester is recognized by his yellow thumb from the nicotine stains. The sand leaves become problematic after curing when the sand is shed from the dry leaves as they are being lowered from the rafters and falls into the faces of the barn workers.

B. has spent two or three summers working for his grandfather up in the rafters hanging both sun and shade tobacco, for five dollars a day and his room and board.

We came across this little interesting tidbit online:

A “farmer-inventor” (in the late 1950's) designed and built a radically different barn intended to
revolutionize the curing process. The “Solaranza” barn, as he called it, was only one third
the size of a typical shade tobacco barn; it used solar heat instead of propane stoves.
The inventor claimed it would save nearly 90 percent of the fuel cost necessary for
curing. There were additional advantages. The cure took nineteen days instead of
twenty-eight, the barn could be built for one-fourth less than a conventional barn, and it
offered significant savings in the amount of labor required to load and unload the
tobacco. The inventor was unable to interest a single farmer in trying out his creation.

“C. A.Brinks Uses Florida Sun In Tobacco Curing Process,” The Chattahoochee Tribune, vol. 59, no. 26,
25 June 1959, 1.


Anonymous said...

Where is the barn in this picture located? Is it near Tallahassee?

S N B said...

It is nearby, over the state line and into south Georgia in Grady County.