A History of Burley Tobacco in East Tennessee & Western North Carolina

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2015 by W.W. Billy Yeargin Jr. with Christopher Evans Bickers

All rights reserved

Front cover, top: Burley fields during harvest, near Vilas, North Carolina. Photo by Joe McNeil.

Bottom: A burley-growing couple in Greene County, Tennessee. Photo by Bob Hurley.

First published 2015

e-book edition 2015

ISBN 978.1.62585.498.8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931114

print edition ISBN 978.1.62619.960.6

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the authors or The History Press. The authors and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

CONTENTS

Preface

1. The Birth of Burley in the Hill Country

2. Veteran Growers Remember Burley in the Old Days

3. How the Quota Buyout Impacted Burley Farmers, by William Thomas Jarrett

4. How Growers Created a Stable Market

Bonus Section.  A History of Tobacco Auctions

Bibliography

About the Authors

PREFACE

When Clisbe Austin and Silas Bernard, two farmers from the Greeneville, Tennessee area, brought the first burley tobacco seed to Greene County in 1887 and convinced other local farmers to plant it, they probably had no idea that they had launched a commodity that would form the backbone of the agricultural economy in the region for over one hundred years.

Now, though burley tobacco seems to have passed its peak, it still is an important part of the lives of hill country farmers. In this book, we have tried to document this dramatic story through historical investigation but more particularly through the words of veteran burley growers who place the dry historical facts into a human perspective. We have also included a section on growers’ efforts to ensure a stable market for their product, a section on the effects of deregulation of burley marketing and a history of the university research station in Greeneville. In addition, we have included a bonus section on the history of the auction market as a means of selling all types of tobacco.

We hope you enjoy it. We have received a great deal of assistance from a number of sources, most especially from the Burley Stabilization Corporation and its chief executive officer, Daniel Green, and president, George Marks. Green’s predecessor, the late Charles Finch, helped considerably in the development of the project and is remembered gratefully. We also thank the staff of the University of Tennessee Research & Education Center at Greeneville for all the assistance it has provided.

Let’s include two sad notes: One of our featured farmers—Johnny Shipley of Greene County, Tennessee—passed away before this book made it to the printer. Additionally, one of our contributors, Bob Hurley, also of Greene County, died unexpectedly before he was able to write the piece he planned to do for us. But he contributed several fine photographs. We were very happy to meet both in connection with this book, and both will be missed.

1

THE BIRTH OF BURlEY IN THE HILL COUNTRY

It is not the only type of tobacco ever grown in the foothills of the Appalachians and the headwaters of the Tennessee River. It wasn’t even the first. But when burley—or white burley, as it was called back then—made its appearance in the 1880s, it quickly displayed characteristics that made it a near-perfect cash crop for farmers in the mountains, ridges and valleys of east Tennessee, southwest Virginia and western North Carolina.

And that wasn’t its geographic limitation. Indeed, the history of tobacco in these states is one of burley slowly migrating from the hills to the central basin of Tennessee, where it has taken its rightful place in that area’s agriculture.

But let’s go back to the beginning. A cash crop was mightily needed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the hill country. Except for the occasional dairy farm, there was hardly any agricultural enterprise that could generate cash for off-farm purchases in this area, characterized as it was by small farms, small fields and, in many cases, steep slopes.

But other types of tobacco just didn’t fill the need. Dark tobacco was grown extensively in the early years. And for fifteen or twenty years near the end of the nineteenth century, hill country farmers tried hard to make flue-cured tobacco work in this environment. They weren’t able to, but as the twentieth century got started, more and more of them enjoyed success with burley.

Two boys and a goat enjoy a break from tobacco in Greene County, Tennessee, in the early 1970s. Photo by Bob Hurley.

Robert Shipley of Watauga County, North Carolina, a farmer who was born in 1912 and remembers that era better than almost anybody, describes the economic situation at the time.

Before burley arrived, most of our people were employed in what we would call subsistence farming, he said in interviews in 2011 and 2013. They were self-sufficient in food and produced pretty much what they ate. They killed hogs for their meat supply and would sometimes kill cattle for beef. Everybody had a garden, and it was standard practice to preserve and can produce. Sometimes you didn’t have to do even that. You could keep potatoes and cabbage for a long period of time just by burying them. So our folks didn’t go hungry: they just weren’t used to having a lot of money.

That changed after farmers learned about the potential of burley. It soon proved to be the only realistic choice as a cash crop, says Shipley. We didn’t have any other dependable cash crop in this area. That was the big reason that burley spread in the mountains.

But adoption wasn’t immediate, Shipley remembers. It didn’t really get going until a federal program was developed to stabilize production and marketing: It led to an increase in price, so that farmers who grew it had some money left over after paying their expenses of growing tobacco. It was a good change, definitely. From that time, tobacco paid taxes and supported the schools and churches of this land.

For all practical purposes, the new white burley didn’t appear in the Tennessee-Carolina-Virginia hill country until 1887, when two farmers, Clisbe Austin and Silas Bernard, procured some of the new seed and brought it to the Greeneville area. They convinced many of the local farmers to plant burley rather than attempting to compete in growing flue-cured tobacco with growers in North Carolina and other states to the east. But flue-cured was in much greater demand than burley, and up until 1916, burley plantings were largely limited to Greene and Washington Counties. After that, when demand for burley was spurred by the popularity of the Camel brand cigarette, its growth spread throughout most of the state.

A burley-growing couple shows pride in a good crop in Greene County, Tennessee, in the early 1970s. Photo by Bob Hurley.

It eventually reached the dark tobacco–producing areas of middle Tennessee. George Marks of Clarksville, Tennessee, remembers, This area traditionally produced dark tobacco, but we didn’t start producing burley until after World War II. Burley came here at a good time. So many farmers were looking for an alternative to dark tobacco, and a lot took up burley then. If you wanted to make [up] for the loss of dark demand or to expand, it was the only way.

It became a stable factor in the economy all across the state, said the late Johnny Shipley of Chuckey, Tennessee, in an interview before his passing. Without burley, it would have been hard to keep the farm in the family, he said. It was the only big cash crop we had. It was your Christmas money, it was your back to school money, it was your shoe and clothing money.

Bill Harmon of Sugar Grove, North Carolina, says, It was the one crop you could just about be certain you would get rewarded on. In 1973, I made enough off an acre of tobacco to buy a tractor in one year. How much was that? I gave $3,600 for the tractor. I may have had a little left. Tobacco was mighty good to us.

In the deregulated economy of the twenty-first century, some younger growers are less optimistic than their fathers might have been. I don’t know how confident I feel about the future of tobacco in this area because of the labor issue and because costs are so high and input costs absolutely are not decreasing, says David Miller of Abingdon, Virginia.

Kenneth Reynolds, also of Abingdon, puts it all in perspective: "Forty or fifty years ago, everybody made money growing tobacco; it was just a matter of how much you got paid. Today, it is a matter of survival of the fittest.

When the federal government ended the supply control program for tobacco in 2004, there was considerable concern that burley might disappear from the hill country altogether, and maybe from the rest of Tennessee as well. What a catastrophe that would have been—like Mississippi without cotton or Iowa without corn. But that hasn’t been the case. Some farmers have gotten out of the crop, a few have gotten in and many have gotten bigger. There has definitely been a change in location. Greene County, for many years, was the leading burley producer in these three states, but now Macon County near Nashville is by far the leader. But that just shows that these states still have plenty of resources when it comes to growing this type of tobacco. It seems safe to say that as long as the world wants high-quality tobacco, burley will be grown in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.

WHERE TOBACCO CULTURE WAS BORN

It should be noted that burley in Tennessee descends by a direct line from the tobacco that was developed by Jamestown colonist John Rolfe, and many of the practices that Tennessee’s early tobacco growers used were perfected in the fields of central Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As described by Lee Pelham Cotton, park ranger at the Colonial (Virginia) National Historical Park in Williamsburg, the Jamestown colonists soon learned to grow seedlings in beds covered with pine boughs. They would be set in the field in knee-high hills spaced every three or four feet using a hoe. This task was considered the most arduous one in the tobacco cultivation process, Cotton says. An experienced adult could prepare no more than five hundred hills a day.

A costumed reenactor at the Jamestown (Virginia) Settlement Park demonstrates how America’s first tobacco farmers planted their tobacco in hills created with a hilling hoe. Photo by Chris Bickers.

Of all the pests in the tobacco of Jamestown, the most feared was the hornworm. These two reenactors show how the colonists would scout for it. Photo by Chris Bickers.

Ensuring that the water requirements of young tobacco plants were met would have been a top priority for the Jamestown colonists. Photo by Chris Bickers.

Until the plant reached knee height, weekly cultivation was necessary to deter both weeds and cutworms. The work was done both with a hoe and by hand, the hills around the tobacco being reformed at the same time, says Cotton. When the leaves were ripe, the plants were cut with a sharp knife between the bottom leaves and the ground.

In the first few years of tobacco cultivation, the plants were simply covered with hay and left in the field to cure or sweat. This method was abandoned after 1618, and growers chose instead to hang the leaves on lines or sticks, at first outside on fence rails and later in barns.

BURLEY IN THE HILLS

Throughout its history and growth, tobacco has played an important part in the development of Tennessee, southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina. Its seeds arrived with the first settlers. Its cultivation spread rapidly throughout the area. It became the livelihood for thousands of farm families in the three states. Tobacco culture has created jobs in manufacturing, processing and numerous other industries related to the tobacco industry. Tobacco sales over retail counters have added millions of dollars in excise taxes to both state and federal treasuries. The development of tobacco in Tennessee and its eastern neighbor states closely parallels that of Kentucky. Both states shared the growth of the three main types of tobacco cultivated in that part of the country—dark air cured, dark fire cured and the light air cured–type burley. But of these types, burley—which we probably ought to call white burley—became and continues to be the most widely cultivated type in Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina.

The dominant type of burley before the American Civil War was a dark air cured–type known as red burley, which seems to have been used primarily in plug tobacco products. It has since faded to near nonexistence. A related strain that arose from a quite unintentional bit of plant breeding led to the almost complete decline of red burley in favor of a new white strain that appeared in Brown County, Ohio, in 1864.

Remember that at this time, chewing products dominated domestic consumption, with plug tobacco a popular consumer choice. Large-scale cigarette production was years in the future, but the new burley strain quickly took a place in the manufacture of chewing production. Indeed, the initial appeal of white burley to manufacturers may have been aesthetic—light-colored leaves taken from it could be used to wrap plug products that otherwise probably contained very dark leaf.

Burley gained in popularity almost immediately, and its growth spread throughout Kentucky and down to Tennessee and then into West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina and points farther away. Its position has never slackened.

Prior to 1924, burley production in Tennessee was largely confined to the eastern part of the state, and the total acreage for the state that year was 31,500 acres. Burley farmers in 1924 harvested just over twenty-seven million pounds. Production of burley has increased considerably since that time.

Smokers have found that the taste of cigarettes improves considerably with the addition of burley tobacco. Traditionally, about one-third of the tobacco in American-blend cigarettes is burley. The leaf is also used in domestic pipe and chewing tobaccos, and a little goes into some varieties of snuff.

A costumed reenactor at Jamestown Settlement Park demonstrates how the colonists would have scouted for suckers and insect pests. Photo by Chris Bickers.

THE PORT OF NEW ORLEANS

We might say that tobacco first gained its status as a commercial crop in Tennessee at about the time that the American Revolution ended. Most of the tobacco then was used purely for domestic purposes because it was extremely difficult to export mountain tobacco to major ports in the country. It could have been shipped to New Orleans via the Mississippi River, but New Orleans was controlled by the Spanish, who did not allow the tobacco to enter that port. Roading the hogsheads of tobacco over the Appalachians was virtually impossible.

Nevertheless, in 1787, an American general