The Good Ole Days – Working in Tobacco

James H. Cagle

I can barely remember my first and last taste of picking cotton. I must have been about five or six when I went to the cotton field. I was too little to pick cotton, but because my mother was in the field, picking cotton, I wanted to be in the field with her. So my Granny gave me a pillow case for a cotton sack and I trudged along beside my mother in the cotton field.

The next year my Granny planted tobacco and I worked in tobacco that year and almost every year after until I graduated from high school at Lowndes and joined the Marines.

In those good ole days tobacco was cropped by hand. It was hot, back breaking, dirty work. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. The farmer, to harvest his tobacco, hired a small crew. That crew consisted of usually four croppers and a person to drive the tractor that pulled the sled down the sled row for the croppers to put the tobacco in. There was usually someone that unloaded the tobacco out of the sled and put the tobacco on a shelf set up in front of the tobacco barn. There were usually four “stringers” at stations on the shelf under the barn shelter that strung the tobacco onto tobacco sticks. The stringers had someone on each side of them that were called “handers” that handed hands full of tobacco to them to be strung on the stick. There were then those that when a tobacco stick was fully strung with tobacco leaves they removed it and laid it in a pile to be hung in the barn later, or if they had enough help, hung it immediately in the barn. If the tobacco was wet, as it usually was in the morning, it could weigh as much as fifty pounds or more. The tobacco was hung in a pole barn. There were strong poles or boards that ran lengthwise from about six feet above the ground to about three feet from the top of the barn. They were spaced out the width of the tobacco sticks. The “hanger” had to straddle the space between these poles and hang the fully strung tobacco sticks with space between them so the tobacco would fully cook or cure.

But there was a lot to do before we actually started harvesting tobacco. There was the pulling of the plants out of their bed and planting them in the field one at a time. When the plants were fully grown we had to walk through the field and sucker and top the plants with our hands. Cropping was the hardest job of all. To crop you had to stay bent over all day as you walked down a row and snapped off the bottom yellow leaves. You slung them under your arm until you could not carry anymore and walked over to the sled to unload them. Then you went back to where you left off and started all over again. And this you did all day in the hot summer sun, all summer long.

My first job at around the age of six or seven was driving a 140 Farmall tractor that pulled the sled in and out of the tobacco field to the barn. I then did every one of the jobs at the barn until I was big enough to crop. You had to crop at a fairly fast pace in order to have the field cropped by the end of the day. There was no time for any fun, except on those occasions when we came across a snake. We would kill the snake and hide it in the sled. Then we would tell the one who unloaded the sled about it, and they would carefully hide it under some leaves on the shelf by the one who was the most afraid of snakes. When they came across it we would hear all manner of screaming and carrying on. We would then stop cropping and stand up long enough to watch everyone run out both ends of the barn.

I’ve hung tobacco in a lot of barns. One farmer I worked for owned a small barn that was made out of logs. Every year before we started in tobacco we went and caulked this barn with fresh mud. The tobacco barn had to be sealed in order for the tobacco to cook properly.

After some of the tobacco was cooked we took it out of the barn, unstrung it, and packed and tied it up in big burlap sheets to take it to the tobacco warehouse for selling. I remember getting two cents for every stick I unstrung.

The money I made in tobacco the first few years always went to my mother and she used that money to buy my school clothes.

I’ve done a lot of hard work in my life but I still say the hardest work I’ve ever done was working in tobacco. I suffered from heat exhaustion twice while working in tobacco. They say that’s when you’ve been “caught by the bear.”

I do remember even when I was six, getting up before light and walking up the dirt road with my mother and older sisters to the tobacco barn and hooking the sled to the tractor. Then years later going out in the field and cropping while the leaves were still wet with dew.

Through the years of working in tobacco the way in which it was harvested changed. While I was still working in it we went from cropping on foot to sitting in a mobile harvester pulled by a tractor. We rode in a seat close to the ground and cropped the leaves as we passed by and handed the leaves to a stringer who sat right in front of us. Today the number of people used to harvest tobacco is very small. The way it’s harvested and sold is different as well.

In the good ole days working in tobacco was a way of life for me and most of my friends. And, it was the only way to make any money. It was the kind of hard work that young people today need to experience in order to help them grow up and learn to be more appreciative.