Visiting Our Past: Brightleaf tobacco intoxication the 1880s

Rob Neufeld
Visiting Our Past

Sir Walter Raleigh returned to London from Roanoke Island in 1586 with tobacco, maize and potatoes. Tobacco (smoked in pipes) became the craze despite King James I’s condemnation.

“Lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs,” with “the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless,” King James wrote in “A Counterblaste to Tobacco.”

In any case, tobacco became a cash crop in the colonies, eventually spurring one of North Carolina’s first industries. The industry boomed in the 1880s when flue-cured, bright leaf tobacco entered cigarette and plug recipes and Western North Carolina was found to have an ideal environment for the growing and curing of it: dry days, damp nights, and an elevation that aided uniform aging and efficient flue curing.

Buyers looking at tobacco in warehouse during auction sales, Durham, North Carolina, presumably November 1939. Library of Congress photo.

Samuel Shelton of Henry County, Virginia, is credited as founder of the new crop here.  He tested out his brightleaf on three acres in Chunn’s Cove in 1869, and in 1875 formed the Shelton Tobacco Curing Company. He invented a leaf hanging system. His tobacco won a prize at the 1878 Paris Exposition.

In 1879, “Danville businessman J.D. Wilder held the first Asheville sale at the newly constructed Pioneer warehouse” on Willow Street, Tom Lee states in “Southern Appalachia's Nineteenth-Century Bright Tobacco Boom” (“Agricultural History,” Spring 2014).

MORE: Tobacco farming’s uncertain future

Capt. S.B. West, who had been “connected with” Wilder, branched out to the Madison Tobacco Warehouse in Marshall, the Asheville Citizen noted on Jan. 14, 1885. 

That warehouse had opened on Wed., Jan. 14, 1880, the Asheville “Weekly Citizen” reported, and proceeded for a few days, the highest grade selling first at a top price of $52 per 100 pounds ($1,200 in today’s currency).

Got a bid

“Dance with me darlins. Pretty boy, you got X (a bid figure). Come here, pretty boy. Get your hand in your pocket.”

That was an American tobacco auction chant in some parts of the South, Koenraad Kuiper and Frederick Tillis document in the Summer, 1985 issue of “American Speech.”

Another version was “X I'm bid, X I got. Come on, come on. Well, let's go.” The authors call this a traditional English patter as opposed to the slave-inflected one cited before.

“The character of the chant of the tobacco auctioneer of the southern United States,” they state, is the joint product of the 17th century English auctioneering tradition… and the musical tradition of black slaves deriving from West Africa.”

Presumably, auctioneers, needing to keep their voices going fast for a long time, had adopted the day-long chanting of slaves, who had worked in their fields and who had been auctioned off themselves to the rhythm of fast sales.

The function and presence of slave labor before the Civil War is baked into the origin story of brightleaf tobacco. In 1839, a slave named Stephen, watching the fires in the tobacco barn of Caswell County planter Abisha Slade, fell asleep and then awakening, rushed to pile charred logs on the dying embers.

The slow drying process produced a golden hue and aromatic taste.

The Asheville scene

There were four tobacco warehouses in Asheville in 1883 according to the City Directory, two along Walnut Street, and two along what is now Biltmore Avenue. Most of the buyers were from Tennessee because Asheville didn’t have many factories yet.

“In the warehouse the tobacco is placed in piles a foot or two high on the floor,” Kuiper and Tillis write. “The piles are arranged in long rows with one or two feet of space between them. During an auction the auctioneer and his party stand on one side of the piles of tobacco and the buyers stand on the other.”

Leaf piles on slab floors won no décor awards, but they stood for themselves.

“No other crop was so easily put on the market and no other yielded such ample returns of ready cash,” Foster Sondley wrote about brightleaf.  WNC tobacco "took prizes for best in the world. In 1882, Buncombe County raised 500,000 pounds; the next year, 7 million pounds were sold in Asheville, worth $1.5 million.

"Soon great quantities of land were cleared in order to be planted in this crop, and tobacco barns for curing these crops began to appear all over the county.”

MORE: Portrait of the past: Turkish tobacco

The smell of prosperity was everywhere.

In Wilma Dykeman’s historical novel, “The Tall Woman," Gib and Burn come to their mother, Lydia (the Tall Woman), with news.

“Why, you go in town,” Burn said, “all you see or smell or hear talked is tobacco. Last fall, after the curing season, the streets were thick with wagonloads of stuff. There were strangers everywhere with pockets full of money come to buy tobacco, and most anywhere you turned you could hear auctioneers at the warehouses shouting out the prices.

“Porches of the freight depots were plump overflowing with piles and piles of leaves and there was no getting away from under the smell of it. I tell you, it was something to behold.”

“From Buncombe County, bright tobacco culture spread rapidly to contiguous portions of western North Carolina in advance of the Western North Carolina Railroad.” Tom Lee writes. “Bright tobacco culture expanded first to Madison County, which would become the leading producer in western North Carolina.”

“We believe,” tobacco representatives said in 1880, “that in these two counties the area of land planted in tobacco will be three times larger this year than last,” and “will rank second to but few other counties in the quantity of tobacco raised. Already they are second to none in the quality grown.”

The 1910s brought another boom as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. broke from J.B. Duke’s American Tobacco Co. monopoly and started producing Camels, 15 billion of which sold in 1920, Sydney Nathans documents in “The Quest for Progress.” That was “more than half the cigarettes smoked in the United states.”

Camels blended brightleaf, burley and Turkish leaves to create a tasty, better-burning product. This was in advance of public cancer awareness. Turkish tobacco was a new import, formerly considered ungrowable in the states, but cultivated in Southern Appalachia with altered methods, such as no topping.

New Deal policies tamped the tobacco rage by persuading farmers to reduce tobacco acreage in exchange for better prices. Allotments went into effect.

More:Portrait of the Past: “Burley beauty,” c. 1940

In the 1990s, price controls and guarantees ended and companies and farmers transacted via contracts rather than auctions. Warehouses and auctioneers faded away

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times.  He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on WNC.”  Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.net; call 828-505-1973.