Tobacco Still Raised the Old Way at Williamsburg

Source from:  WILLIAMSBURG, Va. wkyt.com 09/13/2005

David Nielsen has a tip for Kentucky tobacco farmers worried by worms. "Run turkeys through the field," he suggested. "We do have some evidence of farmers doing just that." Nielsen is a rural trades interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, the famous living history museum and restored 18th-century capital of Virginia, Kentucky's parent state. Nielsen dresses like a 1700s farmer. He raises tobacco the old way. Kentucky is tobacco country. But Bluegrass State farmers might be surprised at Nielsen's crop and how it grows. It has skinnier leaves. Each plant sprouts from its own little hand-hoed hill. "The seed for our tobacco originated in Venezuela," Nielsen said. "We grow it because it most closely resembles 18th-century Virginia tobacco." Nielsen's crop is for show, not sale. But tobacco was a big moneymaker in old Virginia. In the colony's early times, tobacco, dubbed "brown gold" or "the golden weed," sometimes was used like currency. Traditionally, Kentucky farmers have gone by the same crop cycle as 1700s Virginia growers: seeds are sown in a plant bed in late winter; seedlings are transplanted to the tobacco patch and the mature leaf is harvested in late summer. "But everything was done by hand in the 18th century," Nielsen said. That included warring with worms and battling bugs. "They didn't have pesticides in the 18th century," Nielsen said. He isn't sure how successful turkeys were as pest control. "The records don't say. Usually, when a farmer found a worm or a bug, he squished it with his fingers or stomped it with his foot," Nielsen said. Like 21st century Kentucky tobacco, 18th century Virginia leaf was dried, or cured, before it was sold. "It was hung in 'tobacco houses' for six to eight weeks," Nielsen said. "The term 'tobacco barn' came later." In colonial times, tobacco was also hailed as "the bewitching vegetable," "the holy healing herb" and the "jovial weed." Even so, the plant had detractors. Critics called it "the chopping herb of hell" and worse. King James I of England, for whom Jamestown, Virginia's first settlement, was named, hated tobacco. Never mind that Virginia's big tobacco boom began in Jamestown, which was also England's first successful North American colony. The sovereign sneered at smoking _ "drinking tobacco" in his day _ as "loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." Nonetheless, no English monarch banned tobacco. "It was too profitable," Nielsen said. Enditem