Tobacco was a major Kinston business before Kinston was Kinston.
The earliest histories of Kinston mention a tobacco warehouse on the banks of the Neuse River.
Today, despite the amazing growth of beef and hog production for markets in the Kinston area, despite the huge Du Pont Dacron plant and despite the concentration of needle work factories in the Kinston area TOBACCO is still the kingpin of the Kinston economy.
Dollar-wise, employment-wise and certainly emotion-wise, tobacco has no close competitor for top billing in Eastern Carolina in general and the Kinston area in particular.
From January 1 to December 31 tobacco IS king, but King Nicotine holds court each year from mid-August until early November when the faithful pay homage in the huge “palaces of tobacco” where the peculiar song of the auctioneer and the sign language of the tobacco buyer combine to indicate whether King Tobacco has been good or bad to his servants.
Although Kinston exerts every effort to become something more than a seasonal “market town,” it still glistens in its most material splendor when it IS a market town, and the royalty checks pour forth from the dozen tobacco warehouses.
In 12 to 13 weeks while King Nicotine’s court is in session well over a half million dollars a day will pour out—in the good years—and the happy tune of cash registers ringing brings smiles to the habitually long faces of the merchant classes.
Into town come people who haven’t been to town since “last tobacco selling.” They cash their checks, make their purchases and return to their scattered, secret retreats to talk through a long winter about the things they saw, and some times did.
But these frightened, strange looking residents of “Tobacco Road” grow fewer each year. Twenty years ago they were nearly the majority. Today they are strange sights even to the more urbane tobacco growers wo live more nearly in the middle of midd-20th Century civilization.
Into town comes the “young son” to sell his first acre of tobacco. He’s “his own man now.” Papa and mama will never be able to keep him down on the farm again. Some wise few of these young sons selling their first acre of tobacco will salt it away in a bank or savings institution for a college education, but nine out of 10 will invest their sudden wealth in a flivver or perhaps even a new car with a little help from “ma and pa”.
The girls get an acre of tobacco too in this time of “equal rights” but they depend on riding in the cars of “young sons” and spend their money on fine clothes, a glorious relaxation in the beauty parlor and come out looking like Fifth Avenue models.
And there are the older rogues.
The kind with loose money, looser morals and an inclination to howl.
But as each year passes a larger percentage of those men and women who work the long, hard, stick hours that it takes to make a tobacco crop, handle their tobacco money more wisely. In savings accounts, trust funds for children, new or greatly improved and modernized homes.
Tobacco farmers who for generations lived in a “feast and famine” fashion have happily reached that point where hard work, know how and reasonable good luck guarantee them a little, if not all the finer things every year.
Now they visit the beauty parlors as regularly as their cousins who live in town. They dress, on average, better than town folks. They drive newer, and bigger cars, and they have bigger and more stable bank accounts.
Any analysis of savings deposits in banks and other savings institutions in Tobaccoland, USA, would quickly reveal that the tobacco farmer is sharing the nation’s prosperity.
The laborers, the sharecroppers still live a hand-to-mouth life; but the better class tenants and land-owning farmers—they never had it so good. And the best of good times is tobacco selling time.
From the front page of the Jones County Journal, Trenton, N.C., Thursday, Aug. 18, 1960
No comments:
Post a Comment