Tobacco – Page 14 – Dan Routh Photography

Carrying Tobacco

Portraits, Tobacco

Tobacco worker. Randolph County, North Carolina.

Priming Tobacco

Agriculture, Farm, Harvest, Tobacco, Work

Tobacco workers harvest organic tobacco for Whitaker Farms in Randolph County, North Carolina.

Grandpa’s Tobacco Barn

Family, Farm, Tobacco

Old tobacco barn on our farm in Grays Chapel, North Carolina.

Pot Belly Stove

Farm, Still Life, Tobacco

An old pot belly wood stove stands beside a pile of tobacco sticks in my Grandfather’s old pack house.

Pack House Chair

Farm, Still Life, Tobacco

An old chair sits in the tobacco pack house on my Grandfather’s place in Grays Chapel, North Carolina, left from a time when cured tobacco was graded and packed for market.

Tobacco Pack House

Tobacco

Tobacco pack house, Durham County, North Carolina.

Earlier this summer I posted some images of my neighbor Gary McMasters harvesting his burley tobacco on his farm in Grays Chapel, North Carolina. The tobacco has been hanging in his barn drying for several months. Saturday when I stopped by I found Gary starting a fire in the stove in his pack barn so he and his neighbor Charlie could work on grading his crop. Grading burley tobacco involves stripping the leave off the stalks and separating them by “grades” into piles. The piles are then placed into a press and made into bales which are sold at market. The stove is necessary because for one thing it’s pretty cold in the pack barn, but the heat also helps put the tobacco in “order”, or in other words, it helps Gary keep the humidity right so he can work with the leaves without too much or not enough moisture.

Tobacco Hand

Farm, Tobacco

A tobacco hand wrapped for market, the traditional way.

Burley Tobacco Farmer

Agriculture, Farm, Tobacco

Neighbor Gary McMasters along with daughter Elizabeth and another neighbor Jerry Ferguson gathered and sticked burley tobacco this past weekend in Grays Chapel, North Carolina in preparation to moving it to a drying barn. Unlike flu-cured tobacco where leaves are removed as they ripen up the stalk, burley is harvested by cutting the whole plant, and it is air dried rather than being cured by heat. Gary raises about 1 1/2 acres and does pretty much everything by hand. Traditionally, burley tobacco was grown in the mountains of North Carolina and flue-cured in the Piedmont. New varieties have made it possible to grow burley in warmer areas.

Gary lives on land that has been in his family for several generations in Randolph County and besides farming tobacco and other crops, he runs a small custom saw mill and raises horses and mules. He produces sorghum molasses every year on a mule driven cane mill.