6AM. Microtel Inn, Hillsborough, North Carolina. Breakfast, similar cast of characters as yesterday. TV news features Cary once again, this time for a gas explosion with flames shooting up. A construction crew hit a gas line. Seems that growth is happening so fast it’s difficult to keep track of where all those utilities are…

Left Hillsborough at 7:30 AM on I-85 for Oxford.

Donald Hester called New Planters Tobacco Warehouse yesterday and arranged for me to visit and photograph. The warehouse is “receiving” tobacco on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Get there by 8:30,” he advised.

Found the Outer Loop around Oxford. Thought I’d gone too far when I saw an enormous operation with a dozen or more metal barns-warehouses, all surrounded by barbed wire fence: Universal Leaf. I drove around the perimeter on three sides before finding the gate, which was barred. Called on a phone beside the gate. I’m looking for New Plantation. This is Universal Leaf. Can you give me Directions? Yes. A big trailer truck pulled up behind me, blocking my exit. The gate opened. I can see you on the camera.

Marion Post Wolcott. “Part of tobacco warehouse showing farmer’s car with trailer of tobacco for auction. Oxford, North Carolina.” November 1939

9AM. New Planters Tobacco Warehouse No. Two, Oxford. “Ask for Keaton Rankin,” Donald Hester had told me: “He’s bald, in his 30s, will be wearing short britches (he wasn’t), and racing around (he was). “No admittance” warned the sign on one door, “Office” said another. Keaton was in the office and waved me in to the enormous interior space of the warehouse, the size of a football field. No formalities or introductions. I was on my own. All the action is along the far side of the warehouse. Between the office and the receiving dock/grading station are rows upon rows of tobacco bales stretching into the distance. Smell of cured tobacco. The ceiling is quite high, but the bales are stacked only two or three high. So why is the roof so high?

There are only two Black men in the warehouse. They are tagging tobacco bales, hoisting them from the growers’ trucks into the warehouse, sweeping up. One, dressed in a grey sweater and khaki pants, is skinny, older, limps. The other, in a green T-shirt is younger, round. Both are quiet, aloof, unengaged in the easy back-and-forth among the small group of white men. A Hispanic fellow driving a “toe motor” (fork lift) moves bales from the end of the grading conveyor belt to the stacks in the warehouse.

Marion Post Wolcott. “Unloading tobacco from trailer into baskets according to the grade the night before auction sale in warehouse. Durham, North Carolina” November 1939

Two companies are buying tobacco: Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company and United Tobacco Company (United grades tobacco for Santa Fe). Santa Fe contracts with growers and is exacting in its requirements: the tobacco must be grown without pesticides and be light in color with low nicotine. Santa Fe pays growers a bonus of 25 cents per pound (the check comes right before Christmas) IF the tobacco passes grade. If it does not, then United may buy the tobacco (or not). One young white fellow – tall, thin – does all the grading and recording.

The process:

1. A farmer pulls up alongside the loading dock. His pickup truck pulls a flatbed trailer with 10-16 bales, depending on its length. The two black men put a tag on each bale: orange for Santa Fe, blue for United. Each tag, labeled United Tobacco Company with the supplier’s name and ID number, is numbered and has a barcode. Several white men look over the bales, poke them, occasionally dig into a bale and pull out tobacco leaves to examine.

2. Using a hoist with metal jaws, Keaton and one of his workers move each bale from truck to warehouse, then up onto a conveyor belt.

3. One by one, each bale on the conveyor belt passes through two sensor plates and onto a scale before coming to rest in front of the grader. The sensors record moisture content at various points within the bale; these are averaged, and the final result displayed in red numbers. Today the variation among bales is from about 10% to 17.8% (18% is the highest moisture content acceptable to buyers). The higher the moisture content, the heavier the bales, which today range from about 550 to 835 pounds.

Marion Post Wolcott. “Farmers in warehouse during the auction sale. Two bookmen on each side of the row follow the auctioneer and buyers calculating the amount of the sale by multiplying the price times the number of pounds. Mebane, Orange County, North Carolina. See subregional notes (Odum) November 9, 1939″

4. The grader evaluates the color of the leaves (orange is preferable, yellow not), the position of the leaf on the stalk (top leaves are rated most highly, bottom leaves command a lower price). He feels the leaf for moisture and oil (too dry is not good). The list of tobacco grades, criteria, and price per pound is taped to the side of a panel nearby. Over the course of the morning, the tobacco bales are rated as T1H, B1, and B4. T1H is the highest grade for leaves from the top of the plant: “superior quality, overripe, orange to deep orange tips with oil, no waste. $1.72 per pound.” B1 is the top grade for leaves from mid-stalk: “choice quality, ripe, orange leaf with oil, no waste. $1.65 per pound.” B4 leaves, also from mid stalk, are a lower grade: “average quality, ripe, orange or lemon leaf, up to 10% waste. $1.40 per pound.”

Marion Post Wolcott. “Farmers examine each others’ tobacco to see what price it has brought after auction sale in warehouse. Durham, North Carolina. November 1939″

Marion Post Wolcott. “Tobacco warehouseman examining farmer’s tobacco before auction sale. Durham, North Carolina.” November 1939

5. Once the grade is determined, the grader punches the weight into a hand-held bar-code reader, reads the bale’s tag, then points and clicks the reader on one or two of the many labeled barcodes, which are mounted on the wall behind him. The first code is the tobacco grade, the second is a classification intended for a specific customer or for processing in the factory. Then he pushes a button, and the bale moves down the conveyor belt, a new bale taking its place.

6. The bar-code reader transmits the recorded information to a printer which spits out a USDA inspection sticker with grade, date, weight, and supplier. This label is affixed to the back of the bale’s tag.

7. A man driving a toe motor grabs each bale as it reaches the end of the belt and stacks it in the warehouse.

The lowest price today was $1.40 per pound. The tobacco was grown for Santa Fe, but did not make the grade. United offered to buy it, but for a rock bottom price. The farmer was not happy. At 50 cents less per pound plus the 25 cents per pound bonus, his loss is 75 cents a pound for a 700 pound bale or $525 per bale; for 12 bales, that’s a loss of $6300. He refused to accept the price. “Can’t make a living at that price,” he told the buyer. “We’re just trying to help you out here,” said the buyer from United. The grader stuck a red flag into the bale and moved it off the conveyor belt, along with all his other bales. But the farmer hung around, talked to the older men. What will he do? I asked the buyer. “Figure that he can take it somewhere else and get a better price.” But, finally, about twenty minutes later, the farmer decided to accept $1.40 per pound.

Marion Post Wolcott. “Mr. and Mrs. Elvin Wilkins (Rosa) are dissatisfied with the price they received at auction of their tobacco. They are discussing whether or not they shall take it home or to another warehouse for sale at a later date, or whether to accept the price bid.” Durham, North Carolina, November 1939.

Many of the men are smoking cigarettes, including the unhappy farmer. One of the younger buyers tells me that the tobacco business has changed greatly over the past ten years. Up until a few years ago, tobacco was sold at auction (in this big warehouse). USDA agents graded the tobacco, and bidding on the lots was determined by the grade. Farmers had no contracts from the buyers, but they did have a federal subsidy. When the system changed a few years ago, each tobacco farmer got a check to compensate for the loss of the subsidy. The “buyout” made many farmers millionaires overnight, he says.

Today tobacco is grown under contract to a tobacco company. United Tobacco Company, for example. Sometimes UTC buys tobacco for another company.

One of the graders says Donald Hester always gets top dollar for his tobacco, bad season or no. (There’s been no rain here for 90 days). It’s not all the weather. A lot of the quality of the leaf comes during the curing, and there’s a lot of skill in that.

A bale comes through with beautiful leaves laid out on the face of the bale: flat, compresses, like a perfect leaf prints in a fossil. I remark on its beauty. But he says that laying out those good leaves like that is an insult to the grader and buyer. It’s called “putting a face” on the bale. That’s why the grader digs down to the center of a bale and pulls out the leaves there to see if they are just as good as those on the surface.

Left the warehouse at 11:00 and drove into Oxford. Picked up a map at the Chamber of Commerce. Stopped at the Granville County Historical Society museum to find out where Lange’ 1939 photo of the CSA (Confederate States of America) monument was taken. When I was here in July 2006, I could not find the buildings shown in the photo and the monument was in a different part of town, down a side street near some federal office buildings. The director showed me where the photo was taken: right in the middle of the street in front of the county courthouse looking toward Hillsborough Street. When was the monument moved? “In 1970, when my grandmother died,” said a man who was with the director. My grandmother kept them from moving it until the day she died. No sooner had we put her in the dirt than they moved that monument. They called it a traffic hazard. That was the only way they could get it moved; but it wasn’t a hazard, it slowed people down.”

The building to the left of the monument is now a bank, the upper floors cut off. The imposing structure in the center of the frame has vanished, replaced by a parking lot and a drive-in teller for the bank.The building to the right is painted, the ornamental details of the facade still visible beneath the paint.

Dorothea Lange: “July 6, 1939. Oxford, Granville County, N.C. Small agricultural town, note ever present confederate monument in town center, and calf in a two horse wagon.”

On the photographs:

The black and white photographs by Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott are in the collection of the Library of Congress, the color photographs were made by Anne Whiston Spirn on October 11, 2007.

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