Barrell being pulled on a rolling road

Maryland Historical Society

Tobacco shaped most aspects of life in the five counties of Southern Maryland--Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Prince Georges, and St. Mary's--for over 325 years. Tobacco was already the major crop of Virginia when Maryland settlers arrived in 1634. Cecilius (Cecil) Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, desired an economy based on food production, but his colonists saw tobacco as the path to fortune. As the young settlement grew, every aspect of life became dependent on tobacco.

Tobacco Growing
Growing tobacco was a year-long, labor intensive process. In January and February, farmers prepared new fields by girdling trees. They cut through the outer layer of bark with axes to kill the tree, but left it standing. In the spring, they would plant among the dead trees. In older fields, they burned fallen branches to increase fertility. After the dead trees finally fell, the stumps were burned. This system of “slash-and-burn” continued until the introduction of phosphate fertilizers in the mid-nineteenth century. Because livestock roamed freely, fields were often bordered by split rail or "worm" fences.

By March, with fields ready, farmers turned to making seed beds, carefully cultivating the soil in a protected area. There they sewed the tiny tobacco seeds, then covered the beds with pine straw, later wheat straw, and, in the twentieth century, with commercially available row covers. Here the tobacco seedlings sprouted and were cared for until they could be planted out in the fields.

Colonial farmers used hoes rather than plows, and in April they began to hoe their tobacco fields into 18-inch-high hills--3,000 per acre. One man could tend 9,000 hills (three acres) of tobacco. He would also make two acres of corn hills, in which he planted corn the Indian way, five kernels to a hill, with a dead fish to fertilize the growing plants and squash vines to shade the soil and keep down weeds. Although farmers began to use plows to prepare their fields in the early nineteenth century, tobacco still remained labor intensive.

By late May or early June, tobacco seedlings were ready to transplant. Before electricity and irrigation, farmers waited until there was enough rain to make the soil muddy, then carried the seedlings to the field and planted each by hand. Even with the invention of mechanical row planters in the twentieth century, each plant still had to be set out by hand.

All summer, farmers weeded their fields with hoes, topped plants by hand to encourage large leaves, and picked off tobacco the caterpillars, known as hornworms (Manduca sexta). They drove turkeys through the fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because turkeys like to eat hornworms.

Tobacco was ready to be harvested in September. Plants were cut at their base in late morning, after the dew dried, and left in the field to wilt. Each plant was then speared onto a stout five-foot stick, and the sticks carried to a barn where they were hung in rows.

Tobacco Barns
Maryland tobacco was air cured. Early barns were made of unchinked logs. By the nineteenth century, most barns had wooden siding that could be propped open. These barns had a two-storey central section, with one-storey sheds on two or even all four sides. Large rectangular "drive-through" barns became popular in the twentieth century; these had vertical siding that could be opened on hinges. In the early twenty-first century, tobacco barns have become an endangered species.

Tobacco Marketing
Tobacco was prepared for market in October or early November. Farmers stripped the veins out of the dried (cured) leaves and tied the leaves from each plant together in bundles called "hands." These hands were then packed tightly together (prized) into hogsheads (large barrels containing1,000 to 1,200 pounds of tobacco). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tobacco was shipped directly to England. Hogsheads were placed on their sides and drawn by oxen down to river landings along "rolling" roads. The tobacco fleet arrived in November, and ships stopped at all landings along Maryland's many rivers. Here settlers exchanged their tobacco for all sorts of English products. In fact, tobacco functioned as a form of currency--prices of everything quoted in pounds of tobacco.

The Maryland Assembly set official exchange rates beginning in 1747. The Tobacco Inspection Act required farmers to take their crop to warehouses, where it was graded for quality prior to shipment. These warehouses, often located near the head of navigation of creeks and rivers, gave rise to small towns. Farmers brought in their crops and exchanged them for goods, and local merchants then sent the crops on to England.

After the American Revolution, tobacco trade shifted to Baltimore. At first, swift schooners carried the crop, then steamboats. Baltimore came to dominate trade in Southern Maryland the way England had, only instead of ships arriving several times a year, it was several time a week. A new system of trade developed in 1939. While some farmers continued to send their crop directly to Baltimore, most preferred to auction their tobacco directly to manufacturers’ representatives. These auctions were held in the spring at large warehouses like those at Upper Marlboro. Maryland tobacco was considered too dark for twentieth century cigarettes, but was popular in Europe for cigars.

Tobacco and Slavery
Tobacco production required a total of 180 days work from January to November. Because one worker could produce only about 1,200 pounds, a farmer who wanted to grow more tobacco had to increase his labor pool. At first, indentured servants were employed to produce tobacco. Young people, mostly male, arranged passage to Maryland with a merchant in exchange for the sale of their labor for a period of usually five to seven years. The merchant would sell the servant to a farmer. The farmer got additional labor; the servant got passage to Maryland and also food, clothing, and shelter, learned how to plant tobacco, and, for much of the seventeenth century, the right to 50 acres of land (called a headright) when the term of service was over. But the headright system was abolished toward the end of the century, and farmers had to look for other sources of labor. For a period they imported convicts, who were often unsatisfactory workers.

By 1700, slaves from Africa became the major source of labor for tobacco planters. Slavery was concentrated in the tobacco growing areas. In 1790, the Southern Maryland counties had over 42,000 slaves--41 percent of the state's slaves and 48 percent of the counties' population. While the number of slaves fell to 40,622 in 1860, they were 46 percent of the state's slaves and 45 percent of the population of the five counties.

Tobacco and the Landscape
Tobacco production, particularly in the centuries before chemical fertilizers, required a large amount of land. One laborer worked five acres, three in tobacco and two in corn. Both crops sapped nitrogen from the soil, and it was exhausted in five to six years. Lack of livestock and fear that it tainted the taste of the tobacco discouraged the use of manure. The solution was to let the land lie fallow and revert to forest for 20 years. A tobacco farmer thus needed a minimum of 25 acres per laborer. Fifty acres was an absolute minimum for farm size; the median size, however, was 200 acres.

When Maryland was first settled, each man who paid his own passage received 100 acres. Anyone who paid the passage for five men got 1,000 acres (designated as a manor). Thus, settlers fanned out over the landscape--in 1670, an observer noted there were not 50 households in 30 miles.

Tobacco Production
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England imported all of its tobacco from the Chesapeake, thus encouraging Marylanders to concentrate on tobacco production. In 1639, a population of only 300 exported 100,000 pounds of tobacco. By 1700, Marylanders (population about 43,600) exported 6,000,000 pounds. At the time of the American Revolution, the Chesapeake area exported over 100,000,000 pounds annually, dominating the world. Maryland tobacco production rose steadily until 1860, when it peaked at over 51,000,000 pounds.

However, tobacco production spread to other areas of the nation, and indeed the world, and the importance of tobacco in Maryland began to decline. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, tobacco production was confined to Southern Maryland. By 1892, only 21,000,000 pounds were produced, and the number of acres devoted to tobacco was half what it had been in 1860. Near the end of the twentieth century (1993), 1,000 growers produced 12,000,000 pounds. In 2001, a state program began to pay tobacco growers to stop producing tobacco, therefore ending over 350 years of tobacco production in Maryland.

Carr, Lois Green, Russell R. Menard and Lorena S. Walsh. Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

McGrath, Sally V. and Patricia J. McGuire, eds. The Money Crop: Tobacco Culture in Calvert County, Maryland. Crownsville: Maryland Historical and Cultural Publications, 1992.