- Little baby tobacco!

- Absolutely.

This is the more modern

way of starting plants.

In the old times, they would

start these in the ground

in plant beds.

- Are these floating?

- So these are absolutely floating.

They're floating in trays.

They have like a great

root system on them.

- Holy cow!

- And what they're trying to do

is to get the roots to develop

before the plants develop.

It's kind of like planting spinach.

Really soft soil, and they

plant each individual seed,

and each tobacco seeds about

the size of a poppy seed,

they're just tiny, tiny, tiny.

Each individual plant is pulled out,

put in the ground by hand.

They plow down the middle

to keep the weeds out.

Then they chopped out between the plants,

and they might do that two or three times.

And then, they top it,

they put the sucker oil that goes down

that'll keep the suckers from coming off.

They cut every one of

these plants by hand,

and then they lay it on

the ground, they pile it.

And then, each individual

plant is spiked onto a stick.

And then, each one of those sticks

is picked up and put

onto a scaffold wagon.

And then, they're unloaded

from the scaffold wagon

into the barn.

And then, they're taken out of the barn

and taken off the stick

and put on a flat wagon.

And then, the flat wagon is

taken to the stripping room,

and then each individual

leaf is picked off.

So just a little bit of labor involved.

This is a fire-cured tobacco barn.

Before you could just go

to Lowe's or Home Depot

and buy lumber that was cut,

you know, and you could butt it together

and it would be smooth.

You had to have some kind of

way to fill up the cracks.

If you put sawdust and then slabs,

and you have one little poof of air,

you have all of this plant material

in this big, wooden barn,

and it just goes poof, and it burns up.

The slabs that they use

to fire the tobacco barn

are the scraps that it took

from when they make the barn.

And the way the fire goes

is they put the slabs down,

and they lay 'em long ways.

And then, they put sawdust in here,

usually about knee deep,

you know, 24 inches deep,

and it's a recipe

proprietary to each farmer.

And it's only built up to about

the concrete wall down here,

because they don't want

it to touch the wood.

And then, if you notice when

you look around at eye level,

nevermind the door that's

open, at eye level,

everything that's eye

level has been sealed shut,

so there are no air gaps.

But when you look up, they've

left cracks in the barn,

because you want the smoke

to go all the way to the top and through.

So like a chimney will draw,

these barns draw

so that all the smoke is sucked up

all the way through and out.

Every tobacco barn has a

pile of tobacco sticks.

And the stalk goes on here,

and then it hangs across these tiers,

and you can tell the age of the sticks.

This has been milled in a modern sawmill.

You can see the saw blades down the side.

When you get in these older tobacco barns,

it's usually fat on one end,

pointy on the other end.

It was split out with a knife.

Some of these sticks

have been in the barns

since the barns were built.

Every person in the family,

for maybe 100 years,

has handled the stick,

because they put it in

the field, put it up,

take it down, back and forth.

So if there's a such

thing as a piece of wood

that like holds a memory,

it's like you're literally

holding the blood and sweat

of all the people that came before you

that were in this tobacco barn.

When they hang tobacco in the barn,

you have to climb up in there.

So you have like a stick

that's 100 pounds or so,

and you have to hand it up to the person,

because their feet are

gonna be right there,

and they do it when it's the

hottest part of the summer.

So you're in this barn, that's

not very well ventilated,

it's really hot and you've been outside,

and always heard that you're not a man

until you've had another

man's ball sweat in your face,

because it's just, you know, gravity.

You're standing straddle leg up there,

you know, when you reach up,

you're gonna get a big eyeball of sweat.

- And that's great.

Thank you to those that

have sacrificed so lovingly.

- There were literally

millions of pounds of tobacco

that were being produced

just to supply a little

bitty, tiny Springfield.

When we were walking around,

you could see these

buildings are not small,

maybe there's 35, 40 of them in town,

and this was the economics.

And if you can imagine,

all of the tobacco that

was sold in these buildings

was grown within 50 miles.

- All the tobacco would then be outside?

- They would put it in a big line,

and then they would come by

and they would auction it off.

And on one side of the row

would be the auctioneer,

and on the other side of the row

would be the tobacco buyers.

It's like makers of chocolate or,

you know, like other fine foods,

like artisan kinds of things,

it's like, it's a process,

it takes generations to learn how to do,

and it takes years to master.

Let's say if they get 40 good crops,

so you've learned, you know,

like through your

grandparents or your parents,

and then you get to be

20, well, when you're 20,

they're not gonna turn

over the farm to you.

When you're 30, until the time you're 70,

that's all you have to

like master your craft.

Now we're at the point

where the 70-year-olds,

their grandchildren and their children

are working off the farm.

Unless somebody documents it

right now like how to do this,

it's gonna be like blacksmithing,

but that knowledge that's been passed on,

for hundreds of years, is

fixing to like just disappear.

When you think about like

all of these things in here,

and like a lot of them

came from the Midwest

or the Rust Belt.

As we moved into an Industrial Revolution

where they had more

production in the North

and the raw materials were

coming from the South,

whether it was cotton, or tobacco,

or sugar, or iron ore,

or coal from Kentucky,

and the whiskey and the cigars,

and the raw materials that were

used to generate that wealth

were coming from here.

You'd always see the

guys sitting at the bar,

drinking their whiskey,

stirring their whiskey with their cigar,

and these great, lavish houses.

It's really a full circle

when you think about it,

that you're in this building

full of things that were

purchased by wealthy people

in a loose floor that is no longer.

So it's like literally an

artifact in an artifact,

and it really tells the story

of culturally what's happening

without ever saying food or tobacco.

It's just the story of people.

- Right.

- Mhmm.

It's like what do we value in our lives?

I mean, it's like, you know, chandeliers,

and glass lamps, and art,

and furniture, and all of the things,

ironically enough, stored

at a tobacco loose floor.