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TOBACCO PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES. 



LABOR. 



Men receive cm tobacco forms from $14 to $20 per month for six or eight months, with board and washing ; 

 day hands from $L to 10 shillings per day during the summer, and are generally boarded at these prices. In 

 winter, in assorting season, wages are low when board is included, ranging from 50 to 75 cents per day. Labor is 

 abundant in winter, and is not very scarce in summer. 



DISEASES OF TOBACCO. 



Except, some trouble with the horn-worm, the gray cut-worm, and the wire-worm, injury from diseases and 

 insects is very slight. The flea-beetle is hardly accounted at all, and white-firing, brown-rust, and kindred wet 

 and dry weather diseases are reported as of small moment. The horn-worm is more injurious to cigar tobacco than 

 to that grown for other uses. 



The following statement shows the production, acreage, yield per acre, value of the crop in farmers' hands or 

 in primary markets, the value per pound, and the value per acre of the tobacco crops of the state of New York 

 for the years 187G, 1877, 1878, and 1879. The figures for the first three years are estimates from the best data 

 attainable, those for 1879 being made up from returns of enumerators and from schedules returned to this office: 



CHAPTER XII. 

 CULTURE AND CURING OF TOBACCO IN NORTH CAROLINA. 



The development, of the fine-tobacco interest in North Carolina exhibits one of the most remarkable transitions 

 in the annals of agriculture. Its growth was first begun in this state by two brothers, Eli and Elisha Slade, ol Caswell 

 county, upon a ridge between two small tributaries of the Dan river. The soil was thin and sandy, and, in comparison 

 with the river bottoms, was of little value. About 1852 or 1853 the Slades grew, by chance, as they supposed, a small 

 crop of yellow tobacco. As it grew" year after year its peculiarities were attributed to special methods of culture 

 and curing. They communicated their methods to all inquirers, and it was soon found that soil was the chief element, 

 although care in the modes of cultivation and curing was also found to be necessary to the production of the best 

 qualities. 



From the plantation of the Slades its growth extended over Caswell county, and along the same ridge into 

 Pit tsylvania county. Virginia. This covered almost the entire area of yellow-tobacco culture before the civil war, 

 when the production of tobacco was almost entirely suspended. The war increased the manufacture of tobacco in the 

 North, where no tobacco suitable for plug or wrappers was grown, and at its close attention was called to the lit ness 

 of the North Carolina yellow leaf for this purpose. The price rose with the demand, and the production extended 

 to other counties, especially to Person, Granville, and Rockingham. Granville outstrips all competitors, although 

 many other coum ic.s have entered the lists, from Buncombe and Madison, in the west, where it is grown on the slope 

 of the Alleghanies, 3,000 feet above sea-level, to the coast belt about Goldsboro', -00 feet above the sea a vertical 

 range of 2,800 feet, and a climatic range equivalent to about eight and a half degrees of latitude. While yellow 

 leaf may have been raised in Virginia in small quantities, this may be taken as an accurate sketch of the origin and 

 spread of the new product in North Carolina and in the contiguous counties of Virginia. 



After the war the cheap and abundant production of shipping tobacco in the West and the reduction of the 

 price below the cost of production in North Carolina coincided, with the demand for fine tobacco, to diminish the 

 growth of the heavy tobacco and to extend widely the production of fancy leaf. 



There arc, broadly and generally stated, two varieties of soil in North Carolina: a gray, sandy, light soil, with a 

 yellow, sandy-clay subsoil, suited to yellow leaf and the various types of fine tobacco, and a dark loam, a rich, unctuous, 

 heavy soil, with a red-clay subsoil, suited especially to the cereals and to a heavy dark or red tobacco. 



The change in the growth of tobacco lias been from one of these to the other. Shipping leaf is still grown, 

 however, both as an industry, upon soil selected for it. and as an incident to attempts to raise fine tobacco upon 

 lands not suited to its production. Sometimes a part ot the same field will ofler both kinds of soil and grow both 

 fine and heavy tobacco. The production of shipping leaf is not regarded as profitable, and planters generally 

 endeavor to raise the fine leaf, so that this is the only branch of tobacco culture worthy of especial notice. 



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