In the Lowcountry, tobacco farming was once a family affair

Smoking and tobacco products are all over the news lately.

An article on a recent Island Packet business page reported that British American Tobacco is taking over Reynolds American Inc. creating a company likely to overtake Phillip Morris International Inc. as the world’s biggest publicly traded tobacco company.

BAT sold 663 billion cigarettes in more than 200 countries in 2015 compared to the shipment of 76 billion cigarettes by the Reynolds Company.

And, as of March 1, 2017, smoking is prohibited at all Beaufort County owned or operated facilities and campuses. The Beaufort County Council voted in November to approve the updated Beaufort County smoking ordinance. The ordinance is accompanied by a program to assist employees and residents in quitting and offers an eight-week smoking cessation course designed by the American Lung Association. The program is offered to Beaufort County employees at no cost and to all other Beaufort County residents for $30.

For information, contact Alexa DeFeo at 843-522-2270 or online at adefeo@bmhsc.org.

Tobacco’s History

The first shipment of Virginia tobacco was sent by John Rolfe in 1613 from Jamestown to England.

Rolfe was the husband of the famous Indian princess Pocahontas. From that time to our present day, growing tobacco and manufacturing its products remains a leading industry.

Many brands of cigarettes, cigars, snuff, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco and useful chemical products, including those used to kill insects and fungi, are some of the products manufactured from tobacco plants.

An item in the 1957 World Book Encyclopedia reads that if packages of cigarettes were laid out end to end they would go around the world about 21 times. At that time, more than 7 million dollars a day was spent on cigarettes alone.

That statement was made more than 60 years ago so certainly the stats have changed dramatically when compared with today’s tobacco usage.

A 2015 Florence Norning News article says that as fewer people smoke, tobacco production has dropped steadily since 1950 when 114,000 acres were harvested with a production value of $81,711,000 to a mere 14,000 acres now bringing in $27,170,000.

The majority of tobacco in South Carolina is grown in Horry, Marion, Florence, Darlington and Williamsburg counties. Relatives living in the small South Carolina towns of Hemingway and Johnsonville remember as young’uns helping to crop tobacco in the fields by pulling wooden “drags” framed with burlap bags on the side down the rows, one pulling on each side, cropping the leaves until the drag was loaded and ready to head to the barn. There, women sat under shade trees and strung the leaves of tobacco by the stem end onto long sticks that were placed on racks and hoisted up in the barns where they would be “fire-cured,” a process that could take 10 days to three weeks.

Then it was time for the auctioneer to come by using his “sing-song” during the sale. That chant rang out like a sentimental oldie for die-hard farmers clinging to the old way of selling tobacco. A small procession of buyers shadowed him down long rows of reddish-brown leaf tobacco piled in bales and anxious farmers anticipated a good price for their crop.

Tobacco farming today

Tobacco farming is a family affair, with everyone pitching in with a helping hand.

These farmers also plant cotton, soybeans and peanuts for harvesting. With more businesses and individuals becoming more health conscious it’s bound to, in the long run, make a dent in the tobacco industry, forcing farmers to invest their acreage into planting more of these other types of crops for marketing.

This story was originally published March 13, 2017 at 8:50 AM with the headline "In the Lowcountry, tobacco farming was once a family affair."