DEVELOPMENT DURING THE PERIOD SINCE THE CIVIL war. 31 
and Caswell Counties, is of a thin, light, sandy character upon a yellow, 
sandy, clay subsoil. The tobacco produced on these soils was mild 
and fine, of good body, tending to cure naturally to a mottled orange 
or yellowish-red to brown color. 
This type of tobacco was found to be particularly pleasing to the 
domestic taste for chewing and smoking purposes and, as the home 
trade has never cared for the smoky flavor on tobacco, it became the 
custom to cure this type largely by air, open fires being resorted to 
only when necessary. In order to keep down the flavor of smoke, 
growers after a time learned to use charcoal instead of wood when heat 
was necessary in curing this type. By proper management of these 
fires in close barns, with arrangements for ventilation in the proper 
manner and at the proper time, it was discovered that the fires could 
be used to great advantage in making the colors still brighter and of 
greater uniformity, developing at the same time an agreeable and 
- characteristic sweet scent and flavor. 
In this coal system of curing, the barns were tightly daubed between 
the logs and small fires were built in depressions in the earth floor of 
the barn about 4 feet apart each way. The labor involved in 
making the charcoal was very great and the task of walking around 
in the hot barn at frequent intervals day and night for several days 
to attend the fires was a very disagreeable one. 
‘The most important step forward in developing the method of 
curing this type of tobacco was in the use of flues, at first built of rock 
or brick and finally of sheet iron. With this arrangement the mouth 
of the furnace was on the outside, any kind of wood that would burn 
satisfactorily could be used, the heat would pass through the flues, 
thus maintaining a much more uniform and satisfactory temperature, 
and the smoke finally pass out of the smoke pipes without imparting 
a smoky flavor to the leaf or discoloring it in any way. The use 
of sheet-iron flues with brick or stone furnace openings has now 
become the universal practice throughout all the bright flue-cured 
belt. 
The methods of managing the cure with these flues have been reduced 
to a high art and the flue-cured type of tobacco has become one of the 
most useful and satisfactory tobaccos for both domestic use and 
export. 
Thus we have, as finally developed, three distinct methods of curing 
tobacco: (1) The method of curing by air, that is, simply hanging the 
tobacco up in barns, with natural ventilation subject to more or less 
artificial control; (2) the open-fire and smoke method; and (3) the 
flue-cure method. 
Since the war period little, if any, new territory has been added 
to the open-fire cured types and the production has a tendency to 
244 
