Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and CommerceBillings, E. R.
History
Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce
Billings, E. R.
Tobacco -- History; Tobacco industry -- History; Tobacco use
His broad fields of the weed can usually be seen from his house and he
loves to show to visitors the plants growing in all their luxuriance,
or to sit on his piazza and call attention to their waving leaves and
graceful showy tops. Few tobacco-growers can discuss the relative
merits of the numerous varieties like the Connecticut planter, and he
is well acquainted not only with the various kinds grown in his own
country but also with those of others. Indeed you may often see
growing in his garden specimens of Cuban, Brazil or Latakia tobacco;
such is his love for all that pertains to this great tropical plant.
He considers it one of the greatest of all the vegetable products and
never tires of lauding the plant and its use. He sincerely hates all
anti-tobaccoites and has a supreme disgust for the memory of King
James I. and all royal foes of the plant. He is, however, a man of
large and liberal views and bestows his favors with a princely hand.
If fortune frowns he may lessen his crop but never his attachment for
the plant. Amid all the cares and perplexities incident to life, he
puffs away and as the ashes drop from his cigar meditates upon the
probable future of tobacco growers and all users of the weed.
The Connecticut tobacco grower is in all respects a man of genuine
refinement and nobility of soul. He is always ready to give
information on his particular system of culture, and how he obtains
such large and fine crops. He is a good judge of leaf tobacco, and can
tell in a moment the quality of his famous variety. He is thoroughly
awake to modern improvements, and always willing to try new
implements, such as tobacco hangers or transplanters in his sheds or
fields. He is just the person one likes to meet, jovial and
good-natured; he naturally loves the plant he cultivates and uses it
freely; lighting his after-dinner cigar or evening pipe with a gusto
that is peculiar to the grower of tobacco everywhere. Indeed he is
hardly in a proper frame of mind to converse about tobacco until he
lights a cigar.
No other cultivator of the soil gains as many friends as the
tobacco-grower. His table is well supplied from the choicest his
larder affords and he cheerfully welcomes all to its side. He is the
friend of the poor and the companion of the rich. No meanness or low
chicanery is his. His attachment for home, friends, and country is as
firm and strong as for the plant he cultivates.
Olmsted in his work "The Seaboard Slave States" gives the following
description of a Virginia plantation:
[Illustration: Negro quarters.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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