Tobacco seeds are very, very tiny. Tobacco seedlings are grown in seedbeds of very fine soil, then transplanted to farm fields in the late spring after all danger of frost is past. In Southside, the tobacco is harvested as individual leaves as they ripen from the bottom up, requiring multiple trips through the fields and back-breaking effort to pick leaves one by one. Then about five leaves are strung together into a bundle, the bundles are hung in a small air-tight shed, and the shed is heated (flue-cured) until the leaves are dried and turn bright yellow.
The leaves traditionally were brought to the tobacco market in burlap sacks weighing 200 pounds, and lined up on warehouse floors in long rows. Auctioneers walked down the rows chanting prices in a distinctive sing-song voice, as tobacco buyers for different companies bid for each pile. The sale continued with the auctioneer and bidders walking without breaking stride, and pile after pile was sold to the highest bidder. After each pile was sold, an employee of the warehouse dropped a copy of the sale ticket on the pile, and a crew of laborers (typically young black men from the local area) carried the burlap sacks full of tobacco off the floor to the storage area assigned to each company. The sacks would then be loaded on trucks or railroad cars and carried to factories in North Carolina or Richmond.
Most Virginia processing plants have closed. The old Liggett and Myers cigarette plant in downtown Richmond is now an office building, and the storage warehouses on the slopes of Church Hill are being converted into housing for young, upwardly-mobile professionals. Twenty-five years ago, it was common in the early morning for the whole downtown to smell of ripening tobacco. The closest warehouses now are several miles south of town - as you drive by on I-95, look for the blue sheds with "Shh! Tobacco sleeping" sign.
In the last decade, the warehouse sales program has changed as well. Tobacco processing companies like Phillip Morris have started to contract with farmers to grow crops according to company specifications. The farmers bypass the auction markets, packing the harvested crop into large half-ton bales for direct shipment to the company's processing plants. The economic impact of tobacco warehouse sales in the Old Belt markets is shrinking annually now.
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Congress passed the Tobacco Inspection Act in 1935. As described by the Agricultural Marketing Service, "This act established the framework for development of official tobacco grade standards, authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to designate tobacco auction markets where tobacco growers would receive mandatory inspection of each lot of tobacco to determine its grade and type, and provided for the distribution of daily price reports showing the current average price for each grade. As a result of these services, tobacco growers and buyers know the true grade of tobacco being marketed and the approximate value of that grade."
If you could bring colonial governors in Virginia back to life, those from the 1680's onward would immediately recognize the value of that legislation. Many meetings of the House of Burgesses focused on how to stabilize the quality of tobacco so all plantations could receive a better price. The colonial government designated the location of official tobacco inspection stations effectively, starting in 1730, but the standards were not applied consistently enough and production was not limited sufficiently enough to raise prices as desired. None of Virginia's original "tobacco towns" on the Chesapeake Bay are still tobacco markets. Buyers go to the crops in the growing regions, then ship it by rail or truck to processing centers. Richmond is still a major manufacturing facility for cigarettees, due to a corporate decision by Phillip Morris to locate a factory just inside the city limits (even though company taxes were slightly higher there).
Virginia had 6 tobacco markets still active in selling flue-cured tobacco in 2000. Burley tobacco was sold in Abington, Gate City, and Pennington. Sun tobacco was sold at Farmville, and fire-cured tobacco was sold at Blackstone and Farmville. Today, warehouse marketing with auctioneers selling tobacco to the highest bidder has been almost completely replaced by direct sale contracts between tobacco companies and tobacco growers. Tobacco is still a major export crop, but it is also one of the main imports through the Port of Virginia. (In 2003 according to port statistics, unmanufactured tobacco was the #10 export and #13 import, by weight). The United States typically exports high-value leaf and imports low-cost "filler tobaccos" from overseas.
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