The close of this year's General Assembly brought an end to another chapter in Maryland's rich tobacco-growing history.
Legislators voted unanimously to abolish the State Tobacco Authority, which was established in the 1940s to conduct tobacco auctions at warehouses so that farmers could get the best prices for their crops.
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"It is also another sign of the times. There are only a few warehouses left standing, and now the authority is gone," said Earl F. "Buddy" Hance, deputy secretary of the state Department of Agriculture and a fourth-generation tobacco farmer from Port Republic.
"It won't be long before people say, 'Tobacco? We grew tobacco in Maryland?' " he said.
Tobacco was once used as currency in the state and for tithing at churches. Tobacco leaves adorn the Tiffany-style dome of the Senate chamber, and there is a leaf on Calvert County's flag.
"It was what saved our colony," said state Sen. Roy P. Dyson (D-St. Mary's), vice chairman of the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee.
A decade ago, amid continuing health concerns about tobacco, the state offered farmers a buyout to stop growing it. About 70 percent signed up for the program in its first year, Hance said. Now, about 94 percent of the state's growers are in the program, leaving about 600 acres of tobacco farms in Maryland. At one time, there were more than 40,000 acres, he said.
The last operational warehouse was in Hughesville, and the state's final auction took place there three years ago, said W. Michael Phipps, president of the Maryland Farm Bureau. Since then, the handful of farmers who still grow tobacco have been contracting directly with tobacco companies, creating a niche market, he said.
"Without the auction market, we have no idea how much tobacco is really produced in Maryland," said Phipps, adding that the state authority had given the farmers clout and bargaining power.
If there was a new tax on tobacco products, like the recently passed federal and state taxes, the growers would fight it together, Phipps said. He still plants a patch of tobacco on his farm, which borders Route 4 at Briscoes Turn Road in Calvert.
Dyson said the authority could never have been abolished during the heyday of the state's tobacco industry. "Today, it hardly caused a ripple," he said. "No one said anything. To be honest, on the committee I serve on, I'm not sure anyone knew what it was."
Dyson voted against the buyout program, saying he was concerned that it would be difficult for families to find a crop as lucrative to replace it.
"It was one of those crops like no other," Dyson said. "We have not had anything at this point that has really replaced that."
According to data from 1944, the value of tobacco was four times higher than those of the next four most-lucrative crops combined. Calvert's tobacco then was valued at more than $3.3 million, compared with the combined value of its corn, wheat, soybean and hay crops: $402,000.
In Anne Arundel County, 12,800 acres of corn were planted in 1945, compared with 7,571 acres of tobacco. The corn was valued at $433,000; the tobacco, $2,693,000.
Hance said that with the help of several state and local organizations, many farmers have found alternatives. His multigenerational tobacco farm is filled with greenhouses of flowers, he said.
The Southern Maryland Heritage Area Consortium is working to get a group designation for five tobacco barns on the National Register of Historic Places and provides grants to maintain barns in the area, said Roz Racanello, the consortium's executive director.
A group of preservationists from the University of Delaware spent months drawing architectural models of Southern Maryland's tobacco barns for the Maryland Historic Trust because so many of the wooden structures are vanishing.
"For those of us that grew up in the region, it is sad to see" the tobacco industry gone, Hance said. "We are quickly being replaced by other people who don't have that history or heritage and don't truly realize what we have lost." Enditem
