Voices & Reflections of Tobacco Farm Women

Voices and Reflections of Tobacco Farm Women: Field, Home and Family Stokes County North Carolina 1900 - 1950 Anne Radford Phillips, Ph.D., Oral Historian Taylor Dabney, Photographer

Maybelle Saner lives with her daughter in Sandy Ridge. She said that she had worn out more crosscut saws than you can imagine. She has built log cabins and other farm buildings and continues to be active and hard working around home and farm.

Maybelle Saner moved to Stokes from Wilkes County in 1934 Times was dull and times was hard up  there...and I was just looking for a better place... looking for work. I reckon it was hard times; you couldn’t hardly have anything.

I had $3.00 when I come to Stokes County. My cousin brought me... on a logging truck... rode up in front---me and my baby.

I got to working around; I went to keeping for people.... They worked in the fields; I kept the babies at the house. I’d just hire out to people until I got in shape to make a little patch of tobacco of our own. The hardest thing was learning to string tobacco. An old man showed me how to flip tobacco.

I worked one hour until I could do it all by myself .

Going to school was often a challenge because the roads were nothing but mud holes, just wagon roads and mud holes. You couldn’t see no highways.

When I got to Stokes, it didn’t look to me like nobody could make a living.  I went into cutting wood, helping people saw wood. Then I went into helping people grub, then trying to raise a little tobacco (about 1936).

Maybelle Saner

That was before you hired help. I remember growing up at home. We would swap work with a family nearby. We’d work in the tobacco at home one day and then one day at their house. We did everything with a hoe and a plow and a mule.

Addie Hill Shelton

Addie Hill Shelton lived in Francisco where she and her husband Sanders tended a few colonies of honey bees.

The sale of honey paid the taxes each year. She went to her garden on early summer mornings to hoe and gather vegetables

It was easier to pick cotton than to work tobacco; I was right down next to it.

Ellen Akridge King

Ellen King is the widow of a minister from Bailey Cross Roads near Walnut Cove. She was born in Georgia and moved to Stokes County when she was eight. She has experience working cotton and tobacco, and has even laid brick.

We had a dry year and Dad had an operation in the meantime. We were hit so hard you just didn’t see any future. There was no market for anything much.

Well, they ate cornbread. Dad said that on Sunday morning they had wheat bread; that was like cake to us when we were a child. Cake was a rarity to us. They had cornbread everyday, three times a day.

So on Sunday morning they had biscuits or pone bread; we didn‘t have time to cut the biscuits.

My mama had twelve children, she made everything they wore. She made all their socks. I’ve heard her (Mama) say many a time that Dad would have to have help on the farm, but said she never had to have help--only when she went to bed for about two weeks to have a baby.

Myrtle Boyles Coble We were not aware that it was ahead. If you had any money there (in the banks) you couldn’t get it.

Myrtle Boyles Coble Concerning the Depression

Myrtle Boyles Coble lived most of her life in the shadow of Sauratown Mountain. She was born in the Mountain View community. She remembers growing up along the Little Yadkin River where she farmed and gardened. During World War Il she worked in a munitions factory in Maryland, sending wages home to help keep the tobacco farm going

We‘d get sand and sprinkle it on the floors. Walk on it a day and then sweep it up. We made our own brooms out of broomstraw. Stokes is full of it; you’d get the broomstraw before the snow’s on it.

That’s all you’d have for brooms.

Alta Nelson

Alta Nelson lives near Francisco, where she has been part of that community most of her life. She fondly remembers picking blackberries along the creek banks near her home. When she was younger, she traded mules at Pilot Mountain

My parents lived in a home of their own; they had a farm. My daddy farmed, we had cows, hogs; he was a very good provider.

Mother did a lot of canning and drying of different foods. It was rough going, but they managed to feed us and keep us warm.

We got water from the spring, down a slope 200-300 feet The children toted water in tin pails. When we washed, we had to bring water from the branch down the hill.  Mama helped everybody she could, even when she had a house full of her own.

I didn’t mind the chopping and hoeing in tobacco and corn. I didn’t like to mess with that manure (used as fertilizer).

Lurenda Moore Berry

Lurenda Moore Berry is the widow of Hiawatha  Berry of Pilot Mountain. She spent most of her life near the Stokes and Surry County line. She raised eleven children, most of whom are graduates of Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC.

As a young child, Betty Lou had to stake the cow by the road where the best grass was for grazing.

I can remember when Mama would go to the spring and wash. All of us children would have to go with her because we couldn‘t stay in the house. She’d pile the clothes on a sheet and put them on a wheelbarrow and go down to the creek, and it’d take all day. Boil‘em in a pot and wash.

Swing ‘em out on a barbed wire fence to dry.

Betty Lou Smith Shelton

Betty Lou Smith Shelton lives in Francisco with her husband of more than fifty years. As a child she worked in tobacco and continued to do so after her marriage. She and her husband also had a store near highways 704 and 89.

To preserve potatoes we‘d dig a hole as deep as two bushel baskets. We‘d put straw next to the ground next to the dirt, then a layer of potatoes, more straw and three to four inches of dirt over the last layer of straw. And he (her father) would put a sack on top of all this and weight the sack down with rocks. They would keep all year.

Inez Burwell McGee 

Inez Burwell McGee is one of twelve children. She was born in the Gap community and lives in King. Her father worked as an operator of wheat threshing machinery. Her father was often paid in wheat for threshing a farmer’s crops.

Family photographs courtesy of the women. Photographs of families in tobacco fields were done by a seed company in Greensboro for their yearly calendar.

All other photographs by Taylor Dabney

Working in Stokes Over a period of months I interviewed Stokes County farm women.

The women were born about 1900 and interviewed when they were 80 and 90 years old; the oldest was born in 1888. All of the women worked in the production of “bright” or flue-cured tobacco, a process and culture. The women were central to the tobacco economy and helped to plant, hoe, weed, sucker, “prime” or harvest, tie, strip, sort, grade, and sell tobacco from the family farm. Thus the women worked in the family production of the cash crop. In fact, men and women from childhood through old age worked in the tobacco crop.

In addition, women performed household chores of cooking, cleaning, washing, planting, tending vegetable gardens, and making jam. They also helped cure meat and dry wild berries for the family. Women participated in work swaps, such as quiltings and apple butter-making; and they cooked for men’s work swaps: wood choppings, haying, corn shuckings, wheat thresh-

I drove over the county of Stokes, a 458 square-mile area, during two springs, summers, a falltime, and in winter visits. I stayed with family members—an aunt, sister, and brother—so that I was able to go out into the field and then come “home” to hear and analyze audio tapes, make notes, transcribe, and then go out into the field again, On an August Sunday when it was ninety seven degrees in the shade, I attended a footwashing and annual communion service at the white, frame State Line Primitive Baptist Church near Francisco. A couple I had interviewed invited me to the Sunday morning service with dinner on the grounds.

Restaurants, as well as gas stations, are sparse in most of Stokes, so I kept emergency rations in the car: Vienna sausages, whole wheat store-bought bread, peanut butter, and Little Debbie oatmeal cookies—the size of a moon pie—with squushy white filling. However, on some days I stopped at the county seat of Danbury, population 151, to observe the scene at Booth’s Grill, which was part Shell station and part hot dog deli, with two booths and a narrow formica-topped counter wrapped around the south and west sides of the room for the overflow lunch crowd. At Booth’s I bought one hot dog with the works for fifty cents and one vanilla, soft ice cream; I ate a little and listened a lot.

The most settling-down part of the research was driving my 1972 bright yellow VW bug around and across the county—listening to a tape of Bach and Pachelbel, with Ron Short’s “Cities of Gold” taped on the flip side. As I drove around Sauratown Mountain and crisscrossed the county countless times, I felt transformed by the mountain, sky, creeks, winding roads, and by each knock on a door.

The thing that helped most was that I was a Stokes native. My life since I had left Stokes after college to teach in the North was somewhat different from the lives of other Stokes women. Yet we shared bonds: motherhood, love of the soil, and family in Stokes.

In returning to gather life stories, I rediscovered my county. I went back as a native and yet as a stranger. I could identify with the accounts of work, pain, disappointments, freedom, and joy; yet I could be objective. I listened and looked.

One woman, a distant relative, knew my great grandmother, Anne Radford Scott Phillips, and remembered crossing the creek to get to Aunt Nancy and Uncle Matt’ s place, where they raised com and grew apples on the bottom land on the west side of the Little Yadkin two miles from the village of Pinnacle.

In every interview and in dozens of informal conversations I had with Stokes natives over a period of many months, I was -struck by the resourcefulness of the people.

It helped that I grew up in the county and had lived many of the experiences they described. I fed chickens, toted wood, slopped hogs, chopped kindling, pitched hay, milked cows, churned, planted, hoed, weeded, picked blackberries, got chigger bites, sweated, and went swimming in the Little Yadkin River, sometimes red with mud and sometimes grey-brown and clear to the bottom. I raced across fields when frost coated the broomstraw and waited for the schoolbus at our country store; I sat on a fourlegged stool while Mr. J. S. Boyles, the storekeeperpostmaster, trimmed with a pocketknife No. 2 pencils to the sharpest point imaginable. I learned to drive on a tractor and succeeded on that first lesson to plow up a strip of wheatfield that was not ready for turning under. I slid off an unruly mule. Stokes was home territory.

Anne Radford Phillips, Ph.D. Oral Historian Stokes County

Afterword I was invited to take part in Dr. Anne Phillips’ project by the Stokes County Arts Council.

The Council had previously provided some funding for my photography project with teenage mothers in Stokes and Forsyth Counties. Dr. Phillips and I met, and I was immediately attracted by her work and connection to the subject. My role would be to create portraits and images for an exhibition on the women who grew up and worked on tobacco farms in Stokes County during the early twentieth century.

The next year was spent visiting Stokes County, North Carolina, to travel around with Dr. Phillips and meet the women she had interviewed. At each home I did a series of portraits of the women. I also asked to go through family albums and rephotograph images that would fit in with the planned exhibition. I got to hear so many wonderful stories about life back then.

This booklet is a sample of the work Dr. Phillips and I did. I hope in some way it conveys to you some of the amazing women I met and the wonderful stories we heard about their growing up on a tobacco farm in the early twentieth century. One quote I will always remember: “We weren’t affected by the Depression; we were already so poor we didn’t really notice.” I want to thank Dr. Anne Phillips for letting me be a part of her work. To the women who took part in the project, thank you for letting us into your lives and letting us share it with others.

Taylor Dabney

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