In some shape or form ..........
nearly EVERYONE did this.
If you owned any farm land.
If you owned some farm land ....
And, who didn't ???????
You got a tobacco allotment.
This meant you could grow some much tobacco.
Tabaco was like cash in the bank.
I lived on a 7 acre tract of land.
This wasn't big enough to be a farm.
But, right behind my house was a big tobacco barn.
To my way of thinking then, it was like having Disneyland in your back yard.
I watched the process you saw on the video from the time
I was old enough to do it, until I was 12.
I knew it inside and out.
When I was 12, my parents got a new house in a neighborhood. That ended my involvement with tobacco growing.
My father didn't do any of the work. He managed his business.
We had tenant farmers doing the work.
They got a share of the money from the sales.
The last thing that's done happens in the "Stripping Room."
That's when the tobacco leaves are stripped from the stalk.
Which is all done by hand.
Every stripping room had a radio.
That's where I first heard Country Music.
Hank Williams and the like.
Where I grew up, in Lexington, Kentucky there were 4 or 5 of these warehouses.
Watch...
Farmers from miles around brought their tobacco to be sold.
When they got paid....they spent some of it in Lexington.
The stores in Lexington made their money on Christmas, Tobacco Sales , and University of Kentucky basketball games.
I'd say that the population of Lexington more than tripled whenever the farmers came to town.
Our best friends raised over 300 acres of tobacco.
You can imagine what their lives were like when tobacco sales died.
They went down the tubes.
Max
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