Pitt County Tobacco

“Tobacco gets in your blood, and then it just don’t want to get out.”

This project started out as a purely personal excuse to gain inside access to tobacco cultivation.  I have been enamored with tobacco farming since I was a child, drawn to the Burley tobacco fields and curing barns once dotting the valleys of late 1980’s and early 1990’s Watauga County for reasons I don’t really understand.  Living in Pitt County, tobacco seemed to be “everywhere” and that fascination was not just rekindled, it exploded, and I have since felt what many would consider an unhealthy obsession to document tobacco growing.  I was not satisfied with taking pictures of tobacco covertly from a few steps past the “No Trespassing” signs along the edges of most agricultural fields; I wanted to be close to the action, I wanted to feel the texture of the leaves, savor the smell of cured leaf, and photograph it in the most intimate way possible.  After a few years of cold calling various entities with ties to tobacco farming in hopes of locating a grower that would allow me to hang around and take pictures, I connected with the Briley family.  Not only were they welcoming to some stranger that asked if he could just take pictures of their family farm, Carl was especially open to answer any question and share his knowledge and experience.  I quickly learned more than I had ever imagined about tobacco cultivation, the current state of the industry, and exactly what tobacco means to those who continue to grow it.

Tobacco is history, tradition, identity, a source of income — and most of all, a way of life — for tobacco growers and for North Carolina.  Stretching back to the earliest European settlers, tobacco cultivation paved the way for the establishment of the colonies and was instrumental in the founding of the United States.  Tobacco — or more precisely, the profits made from tobacco products — lead to the economic growth that created of many of North Carolina’s largest cities, and funded the establishment of many of the state’s most cherished institutions.  Tobacco remains the most profitable cash crop grown in North Carolina, but trends in tobacco production in the US may foreshadow its eventual disappearance from the landscape.

The decline of the US tobacco industry can be attributed to many factors, the largest include reduced rates of tobacco consumption in the western hemisphere following the Surgeon General’s 1964 Report on Smoking and Health, and more recently, increased competition from lower-cost tobacco production around the world.  Politics have also played an outsized role in changes to the industry, from tariffs and trade wars to the end of the federal price stabilization program and the 2004 quota buyout.  Total US tobacco production, which peaked in 1963, has fallen 63% over the last 20 years to levels not seen since the 1870s.

Although Christopher Columbus is credited as the first European to ‘discover’ tobacco in 1492, commercial cultivation in the American colonies did not begin until around 1600.  It would take another 239 years before the discovery of curing tobacco with high levels of heat without exposing the leaves to smoke, better known as flue curing.  The accidental discovery of flue curing is credited to a young slave named Stephen Slade in Caswell County, NC in 1839.  Curing tobacco with this method resulted in bright yellow leaves that contained a higher sugar content, producing a pleasant mild, sweet taste and aroma that allowed for inhalation, making it distinctly different from other curing methods.  The adoption of flue curing was rapid and widespread, leading to a boom in tobacco production and the rise of the cigarette industry in the late 1800s.  The process allowed even small tobacco farming operations to be profitable, where other crops required large investments in machinery and sizable tracts of land, the smaller scale allowed the needed labor to be provided by family members.  During the 20th century, the land quota system and market forces pushed tobacco farming to leverage economies of scale resulting in much larger farming operations, encouraging a migration of the growing region towards the east where larger tracts of land were more readily available.  Today, the majority of flue-cured tobacco production occurs in just a dozen counties situated around the Interstate 95 corridor through the eastern edge of the Piedmont and Coastal Plains regions.

Due to the popularity of cigarettes, Flue-cured bright leaf was the dominant style of tobacco produced throughout the 20th century, encompassing more than 90% the market, and it is still the most common style produced today; North Carolina continues to be the leading producer of bright leaf tobacco in the United States.  While the demand for tobacco has fallen sharply, especially in the domestic market, tobacco continues to play a major role in North Carolina’s agricultural industry and overall economy.  In a way, tobacco is in every North Carolinian’s blood, whether they realize it or not.