Did you know that Wisconsin was an important grower of tobacco for over 100 years? WI workers
stringing tobacco for
drying. Photos courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Some farmers used small tractors to cultivate
their tobacco. Here a 1949
Farmall Cub is used in Wisconsin. In the 1800s
you might have seen small tobacco patches in
Laketown township.
Growing Tobacco in Wisconsin
by Cliff Christianson
January 2009
(From an interview with Cliff in Natchez State Park in
Mississippi where he and his wife and Margp and I were escaping the cold
weather in Wisconsin. Around
his campfire he told me about tobacco raising. A hundred and fifty years ago you
probably would have seen small patches of tobacco around Cushing and Alabama raised by the
families from the state of Alabama who came north to settle in
Laketown--Russ).
Back in the 1940's when I was at home on our farm north of Colfax, WI, we
raised tobacco as a cash
crop. It took a lot of time and labor, but I think it paid for
Dad's farm over five to ten
years. Dad raised no more than 5 acres and at last probably
only an acre and a half.
In the late spring, we planted the tobacco seeds in a special bed. We
made several rectangle beds out of 1x6 inch boards about 2 feet by 15 feet
filled with good dirt well worked up. We carefully planted the tiny
seeds in the bed, trying to space them out evenly. Then we stretched
old flour sacks, as a cover across the whole bed. They were attached
by nails driven through the boards sticking out along the outside. I suppose it
helped keep the plants warm and protected them from the wind and
bugs. On nice days we opened the plants to the sunlight.
As the seeds sprouted and started to grow, they had to be
weeded, watered and thinned to give each plant room to
grow. When they were about six inches tall or so, they were ready to
transplant into the tobacco field—that had
been plowed and kept weed free ahead of time. Each plant was gently
pulled up from the bed and put into pails with water in the
bottom. There were thousands of seedlings to transplant.
We used a tobacco planter. It
was pulled by horses. On it were three seats; one in the front
to drive the horses and two sticking out behind for the planters. A
barrel of water gave each plant a shot of water when it was
planted. There were two pails of seedlings, one on each
side. As the planter was pulled across the field, it marked the next
row as well as dug a narrow trench. One person picked a plant from
his pail and carefully dropped it in the trench while another part of the
planter in the back pushed the dirt back in around the seedling. The
plants were dropped about 18 inches apart. One person dropped his
plant and reached for another alternating with the other person trying to keep
a smooth rhythm.
After the tobacco was all planted,
we started the hoeing. We didn't use a mechanical cultivator so we
wouldn't break any of the leaves. It was all hand
hoeing. As we hoed, we carefully looked at the plants to see if
there were any tobacco worms. They were
big caterpillars with a horn on their head. You grabbed them by the
horn and picked them off and stepped on them. Once you found any,
then you had to spend a lot of time lifting the individual leaves looking for
hidden ones.
Later in the summer, a seed stalk would grow up through the
middle of the plant. We didn't want any of the plant's energy going
into seed making, so we went through the field and broke off each seed stalk
and dropped it to the ground between the rows.
At the base of each leaf, there would be a new shoot start, what
we called a sucker. They had to be broken off too. All of
this time we were still hoeing the rows to keep the weeds out.
The full-grown leaves on the
plant were about 6 inches wide and 12 to 18 inches long. Well before
frost, when the leaves were still green, we harvested the tobacco. We had a sharp metal knife cutter
that we went through the field and cut each plant with its many leaves and
dropped it to the ground. We only cut some of the plants each
day—the amount that we could get into the barn that day. The plants
were cut, dropped to the ground and allowed to wilt, and then gathered and
brought to the drying barn.
Dad had a special sort of spear made to pick up the
plants. It was sort of a wide flat metal arrowhead shape that fit
over a four-foot wooden lathe (like the kind you find in old lathe and plaster
house walls). You went to each plant and poked the spearhead through
the main plant stem, back far enough so it would split to the end. You
slid the split plant stem down onto the lathe until you had maybe six or seven
on a lathe. The spearhead was removed and put on a new lathe and
another bunch of plants speared.
Then you loaded the plants and lathes onto a wagon and hauled
them to a special tobacco drying
barn. We didn't have one of our own, but our neighbor up the road
had a large one that we used (he didn't raise tobacco then). It wasn't
painted—maybe to keep any paint flavor entering the leaves. The
boards on the sides of the barn were vertical, with every other one hinged so
it could be opened for ventilation. Inside the drive-in barn, the
whole barn was lined with a framework of poles—up into the top
part. We unloaded the lathes of tobacco and then hung them up between poles in
the barn. The tobacco leaves were
wilted, but still very wet and needed to dry for a month or more. It
was a little dangerous hanging leaves up in the higher areas where the poles
could roll away and let you fall down.
On good drying days we might open the side boards wide to let
the breeze through. Other days we had to close them. We watched the
leaves so they were drying evenly, spreading and turning them as
needed.
When they were dry enough, as I remember maybe in late September
or early October, they were quite brittle. We waited until we had
one of those fall days with damp fog that made the leaves pliable and then
started baling them.
We had a wooden box, about two feet square, three feet
long. We put two ropes down in the box and out over the sides and
over the ropes a layer of heavy brown paper in the bottom and up the two
insides. Then we took each plant and stripped each leaf off and graded
it into three qualities: was it free of any breaks or holes from
handling or worms; had only a few holes or breaks; or had lots of holes and
breaks. Leaves of the same grade were packed together by laying them
in one direction, then the opposite, trying to get a level square
stack. When our bale was the right size, we pulled the two ropes to
tightly wrap the brown paper around the tobacco leaves and tied them and set the bale
aside.
I think we had as many as 40 bales when we were
done. They weighed about 50 lbs each They were marked as
to their quality. I can't remember if we waited for a buyer to come
or if we sent them to an auction house or just took them to town to
sell. The highest quality leaves were for cigar wrappers, the lowest
quality for filler. I am not sure what the medium quality were used
for—maybe cheap cigars? I don't know how much money Dad got for a
crop, probably $500 or so. In those days a farm only cost a few thousand dollars.
We never used our own tobacco for our own use. Dad always had a can
of Copenhagen with him from the store. I think ours all
went for cigar wrappers. The acres of tobacco you could raise were strictly controlled
by a tobacco board. Although
we raised only a few acres, it took a great deal of time and work.
The tobacco that was raised
in Wisconsin was quite
different from the that raised in the south. Ours had larger leaves
and was harvested green. In the south, they let the leaves yellow
before it was harvested. I think theirs was for cigarettes.
Sometime in the late 1960s, I think, a US law was
changed to allow cigars to be wrapped with reconstituted tobacco instead of a high quality Wisconsin whole leaf. That meant the
scraps could be ground up and made into cigar paper, and the price of WI tobacco dropped tremendously. The
crop had almost disappeared in the state a few years ago. Lately
there has been a WI resurgence when tobacco companies found that raising Burley tobacco in a northern climate changed the
composition to have a lower level of carcinogens.
I mostly remember all the work it took to raise just a small
field of tobacco. You had
to be very fussy with tobacco to get a good
quality crop so the buyers would pay a good price. I still have my
Dad's two tobacco spear
heads. That is about all I have left from my tobacco growing days except my memories and a
sore back!
