The tobacco culture of Wilson County, North Carolina

This dissertation is a social and economic study of the flue-cured tobacco culture in the Coastal Plain North Carolina county of Wilson from the 1880s to the 1990s.

Wilson County had its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century as a part of the traditional southern cotton culture. As cotton prices declined during the 1880s, area planters began to seek alternative investments. Encouraged by development of bright leaf tobacco production in Piedmont, North Carolina, local newspaper editors encouraged planters to experiment with the crop. As did many others in eastern North Carolina, Wilson planters found that the gray soils were well suited for growth of bright tobacco.

With planter investment in production, marketing, and processing, Wilson County developed an economy and society dependent upon flue-cured tobacco. Although New South promoters hoped that the tobacco culture would offer agricultural and industrial diversity, the changes in Wilson's agricultural society and economy were not always positive. Farm sizes declined and tenancy rates increased until the last half of the twentieth century. Local attempts at tobacco processing and manufacturing were short-lived and Wilson never achieved the economic diversity originally envisioned. The tobacco culture assumed its own social structure in time, providing economic opportunities for a few, but only seasonal work for many.

Tobacco farmers struggled to maintain stable prices for many years, finally asking for government support in the Depression years of the 1930s. The resulting crop control program tended to perpetuate much of the traditional landlord-tenant culture until the 1960s when a change in the program and new technology brought the tobacco culture closer to twentieth century agribusiness. But in spite of the changes in production, many of the social and economic aspects of the earlier years of the century remain within the county.