- 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.