The 1997 Tobacco Operation
      by Carl Fleishhauer
      from The ACLT Newsletter 11(3)

On Saturday morning, August 23--as it happens, the same day I sat down to start writing this note for the newsletter--the Wallace family removed the flowers from their 1997 tobacco crop, growing near the ACLT main gate. Removing the flowers is a time-honored way of sending a message to the plant: keep your energies focused on the leaves, where the money is! The harvest followed on the Friday and Saturday of Labor Day weekend, ending with the fragrant crop hung to cure in the ACLT barn about a half mile north on Scientists Cliffs Road.
      This year's crop is being overseen by Wayman "Frankie" Wallace, one of the sons of Woodrow Wallace, now 83 years old and slowed a bit by age. Frankie, together with three other friends and relations, planted the 1997 crop on June 21. Until the early 1990s, the family started their plants in beds on ACLT land but for the last three or four years, they have obtained plants from Mason Gourley Weems, proprietor of Eastview Farm on Scientists Cliffs Road.
      There are two moments of intense group activity in tobacco culture: transplanting and harvest. The former requires a special tractor-drawn planter, while the latter is executed with more primitive technology: machete-like knives and spears consisting of wooden sticks tipped with pointed metal cones. The more advanced technology is more prone to breakdown and that is the state of affairs Paula Johnson and I encountered in June.
     The heart of the tobacco planter is a chain-driven, rotating set of "fingers." Two workers ride the device, facing backwards, and take turns inserting eight-inch-long plants into the fingers, which then carry the plants down and insert them in a furrow that the planter blade has cut into the soil. The action is completed by an application of water from a tank and hose that is part of the apparatus. The chain and fingers are powered by a driveshaft attached to the tractor's power take-off. At the end of each row, the entire planter is lifted up off the ground as the tractor makes its turn to start the next row.
      When we pulled up to say hello to Frankie and his crew, we saw that the system of rods and connectors that bound the planter to the tractor had broken. The men were rigging a temporary fix, using a trailer hold-down strap and a "come-along" (a ratchet-driven device used by contractors to pull materials closer together). We appreciated the investment in ingenuity; it helped make up for shortage of monetary capital for new equipment. Four men are needed to plant: one to drive the tractor, two aboard the planter, and one to fetch batches of started plants to the machine. After the repair, as the operation got under way, one man asked Paula if she wanted to try her hand at planting. She agreed, and provides the following perspective from the seat of the machine:

Planting, from Paula's Perspective

They came around surprisingly fast and I found I didn't have time to actually look at the plant as I grabbed it from those I held in my left hand. "The rig was lowered and before I could even ask the first question, we started. As my partner (riding next to me) placed a plant in the first finger of the planter, he said something like, 'just make sure the root sticks out this way.' I grabbed a handful of plants with my left hand and started inserting one in every other finger. (We took turns.) They came around surprisingly fast and I found I didn't have time to actually look at the plant as I grabbed it from those I held in my left hand. I just had to feel the root and slide it gingerly between the metal fingers. Luckily, the youngest of the four men was walking behind us and checked my handiwork. He said I needed to have more of the plant through the fingers-the plants weren't going deep enough. I tried to make this adjustment and in doing so got distracted in trying to gauge the length of the root. I missed the finger. Fortunately, my partner was there with a plant to fill in. He did it so quickly, and with such manual dexterity, I was really impressed. When I missed a plant later (and my partner didn't fill in), the man walking behind us inserted a plant in the ground where it should have gone.
     "Before I knew it we were at the other end of the field. We turned back to the first row and planted some more. My partner said, 'You sure you haven't done this before?' which was very nice of him. But, like anything new, it took a great deal of concentration and dexterity that I hadn't fully appreciated before."
        There was enough trouble with the equipment, however, to deter the Wallaces from planting more than the small triangle fronting the road. Next year, Frankie said, they planned to cultivate the entire field.
      Paula's lesson in planting contains a second lesson, at a higher level. It reminds us of the value and continuities of culture. The place we call Calvert County has been steeped in tobacco culture for 300 years. The Wallace family's living memories take us back for one of those three centuries. Woodrow Wallace's father John Cephas Wallace (1884-1968) worked as a sharecropper at the farm called Sharpe's Outlet in Port Republic before buying land at the northern end of what is now Scientists Cliffs in the 1920s. His father, Lemuel Wallace, once owned nearly 100 acres of what is now the ACLT, where he raised tobacco. I do not know Lemuel Wallace's birthdate but it must have been around the time of the Civil War; he would have been at work in the fields in the 1870s and 1880s.
      When I chaired ACLT's Cultural Resources Committee, people sometimes asked me, "Why does the ACLT grow tobacco on its land?" My first answer was, "The tobacco tells you where you are." My second answer, for those lucky enough to see the Wallaces at work, was to point out that not all cultural resources were static buildings and Indian artifacts. "The Wallaces," I said, "represent knowledge and local tradition in living, breathing form." That's a cultural resource if I ever saw one.