Is most of the tobacco in the barn by now? (Murray: sale, loft)

[nalabama]

Even after my family moved to Alabama I was sometimes sent up home to help with the tobacco cutting. Some years you just couldn’t get enough of the “mountain boys” to come and help. It was a treat for me, my aunts piled the lunch high with meats and pies and sweet iced tea to make sure we had enough energy to get through the long hot afternoons. A short nap under the shade trees and you were back in the field chopping and loading the wagons for the trip to the barn. I was scared of heights so I always handed up from the wagon or took first level. We had a creek to jump in at the end of the day and it was back to the house for a light supper and a good nights sleep, morning came early. Good memories of hard work and lots of banter between my cousins, folks from the neighboring farms, and the mountain boys.

[kygman]

Here in western Ky. the tobacco hasn't even been cut yet. I never worked putting it in the barn or any of that, but I worked with it from the sale floor to the redryer, where it was steamed, packed and shipped off for processing. Working with that dark fired tobacco was rough on the clothes. Even after a good washing some of that smoke smell was still in the jeans.

[Colorado Rambler]

I still have fond memories from when I was a little girl, hiding out in the loft of my grandparent's tobacco barn and watching all my male cousins and my uncles and my dad bring in the sheaves of tobacco for hanging. And the smell was wonderful! What I wouldn't give to go back to that place and that time for even just half an hour!

[nalabama]

Out of thirteen of us male first cousins only two are still farming tobacco and I expect that this year will be the last crop for one of those two. Only four of the next generation (counting in-laws) are farming today that I am aware of, but I only know of two who are growing tobacco. It’s entirely possible they’ll be the last generation with any full-time connection to farming. I hope it won’t come to that after this family’s more than 200 years in Kentucky.

[kygman]

My funniest true story about tobacco came during my short college years. I was sitting outside my dorm at Murray State at the start of the fall semester when a man who was moving son in the dorm sat down to talk. Said they were from the St. Louis, Mo. area. He started telling me about seeing a barn on fire a few miles out of Murray. "Smoke was pouring out of it". I stopped at the nearest farm house I could find and told him about the fire and that he needed to call the fire department. He said the man walked out on his porch, looked down toward the barn, started laughing and went back in the house, shutting the door behind him. "When he did that, I decided if he didn't care if it burned up, then I wouldn't either." He couldn't understand while I was laughing until I told him that's how they cure the dark fired tobacco. They hang the tobacco in the barn, build fires on the floor, then cover them with sawdust and let the smoke cure the tobacco. I could kind of see his face turning red when he walked back in the dorm. lol

[kygman]

Saw my first "smoking" barn of the fall the other day. Smelled it about a mile before I passed it. Should have more pop up pretty soon! Love the smell!!