My Dad...

...the farmer.  He was quiet, hard working...and a great dad!

Father's Day seemed like the perfect time to write about growing up on the farm. This is the tobacco story....and it's a bit long....so read on only if you are interested.  I won't take it personally if it's not your cup of tea....I have wanted to write some of this down for a long time.




That's our farm in the middle of the picture below....we could barely see another house. Up the road one way was a lake....down the road the other was a river. Does it get any better than that?

I loved growing up on a farm in Edgerton, Wisconsin with 8 siblings.  My dad grew up on the same farm....and actually had to quit school after the 8th grade to help his dad. He never did anything else....he loved the farm.

We always had a big garden, raised chickens for eggs and meat...and for a while we even had a milk cow and a horse. We raised steers, grew corn, oats and other typical farm crops, and our main source of income was pigs. But...we also raised chewing tobacco as a cash crop and I have lots of memories working in the fields starting at a very early age. When we were young we would get a little spending money for the 4-H fair...but when we got old enough to be really helpful we could keep track of our hours and were paid quite well. It was hard work...but it's just what we did.

The tobacco season started for us kids with pulling plants in the spring.  My dad grew the tobacco from seed in long beds.  They were generally covered with white gauze canvas (you can see it to the side in the photo below) to keep the plants from burning. It was one of my jobs every spring to repair the holes in the canvas.

That's me on the left.  We would sit on boards that stretched across the beds and position ourselves for the best sun (before we knew better).  This part wasn't that hard...and we were close to the house if we needed something.  We would listen to the radio, visit or tell stories. Our job was to thin out the beds pulling the tallest plants carefully stacking them in the metal tubs, boxes or baskets lined with wet newspaper.

random internet photo

Next the plants had to be planted....generally on the same day using a "setter" pulled by a tractor. I don't have a picture of us...but found this one on line.  I didn't get to do this until I was older...and it was kind of fun. The plants were on a tray in front of you and a wheel with fingers would come around and grab a plant, and place it in the ground giving it a squirt of water.  You had to be on your toes taking turns with your partner placing the plants in the wheel. My dad would drive slow, steady, and straight...the faster he went...the faster the wheel went.  I remember a time when a storm was rolling in and we were at the other end of the field. It was bearing down on us and he kept going faster and faster to the point we couldn't keep up.  Finally we had to run for cover.

Once planted....we had to walk through the fields after a rain with a bucket of plants and a stick to fill in spots where plants had died. (the stick was used to make a hole) Not fun....neither was hoeing. After a few weeks early in the morning before it was too hot we would hand hoe the weeds between the plants....and most of the time you couldn't see the end of the row on the horizon. We often had 10 - 12 acres of tobacco.....I really really hated hoeing.

Then we got some time off while it grew!  Of course there were other chores on the farm...but nothing quite as hard or as big...for me at least.

When the plants were full grown in the late summer they would flower and those had to be topped off so the leaves would grow bigger.

In the fall...just before school started it was time to harvest.  The tobacco would be carefully cut down into rows and left to wilt so the big fragile leaves wouldn't break.  Sometimes we would pile it up to make it easier to "string"...sometimes we would just string it up from the rows.  Here is a picture of us piling...that might be me on the left but I'm not sure.

We each had a spear that we would put on the end of a piece a lath.  Here I am stringing up the 5 or 6 plants needed to fill the lath. We would do this over and over and over in the blazing sun.

My dad would "string" using a home made "horse" that would hold the lath.

The plants would be picked up and hung on a wagon. 

Here's my sister Nancy driving the tractor....one of my favorite jobs....

probably because it was a bit of a break. 

Then the plants would be hung in a tobacco barn between the rafters starting way at the top. Here's my little brother Rich....handing lath to my dad to hang. 

Thank goodness I never had to do this job....I'm afraid of heights.

Here's tobacco drying in the barn.

It would take the rest of the fall into the winter for the tobacco to dry and turn brown.  Then sometime around Thanksgiving I think....it was time to "strip". The tobacco was brown and brittle at this point so could only come down during "case weather"....those damp foggy days in the early winter. It would get moved one load at a time into the "strip house"... a little out building.  We could come home after school every day and go right out to strip....in for dinner...and right back out again until bed time.  It was a small space...and we would listen to the radio and sometimes even sing. I have some good family memories in the "strip house".

Here's my dad stripping tobacco right off the lath. For the rest of of us...the plants were pulled off the lath and stacked in big piles. We would strip them plant by plant...leaf by leaf...and we all had our own technique.  I would hold the plant up side down with my left hand...and while spinning it would strip the leaves with my right...making sure to keep the ends all lined up.  I would hold the leaves between my legs until my dad would make the rounds to gather them up. I remember being so proud when I had a huge batch to give him. He would lay them neatly back and forth in a wooden box lined with string and paper....press them with a heavy press...and tie the bales up ready to take to market. We would try to be done stripping by Christmas...but that didn't always happen..taking us until into the new year. Once we finished stripping we got the rest of the winter off....and started all over again in the spring.

There was a Mail Pouch warehouse in town and my friend Becky's dad worked there.

Edgerton was actually nicknamed "Tobacco City" at the time with a festival in the summer called "Tobacco Days" complete with a parade, floats and even a tobacco queen. Today they refer to it as "Edgerton Tobacco Heritage Days"...and they even have a Facebook page.  

I have a tobacco spear that I keep on the bookshelf in the living room.  It's a great reminder of my heritage....and life raising tobacco on the farm...with my dad the farmer.