south eastern tobacco (log cabin style) barn

Great job!   Looks just like the ones I worked in as a kid. Please post pics when you get the weathering done. Don't forget to add a black snake, there always seemed to be one hanging around.

Looks like the ones I'd see in rural Carolinas......Nice work!! Love it when folks BUILD things!

Quite different from the larger creosoted board ones in Kentucky, like one grandfather

had on his farm.  Those tobacco sticks sound right, 4' (feet} long.  My brother and I

used to use those as stick horses, and when he was attacked by a rooster once, knocked that bird cold with one.  That barn does look like one of those in Smokey Mtn. Nat. Park just north of Gatlingburg, where the deer doe kept sneaking around behind me to get to the corn spilled on the floor.   There are plenty of other log barn prototypes in that park.  My other grandfather only drank RC's, sitting on the porch after a day on the tractor.

Great looking job on the tobacco barn.  When you finish it, don't forget to dab some mud in the cracks to keep the heat in.

 

Look forward to seeing it when you have it finished.

 

Thanks for posting,

Don

That looks great, they'll be nice compliment for a southeastern theme in O Gauge. Good find.

If you are wanting exxxxacccttt,   then you'll need to get you an oil, tank in the back

and of course the flue thru the roof,  that is why Carolina and Virginia "backy" is called

flue cured, and TN and Ky style is cut, on the sticks and hung, in open air barns.

Oh yes, don't forget the hay layin every where along the ground,  also 2 nice large

shade trees in the area,   (  been there in that sticky stuff) what memories !!!!

Great job on the barn.

I look forward to seeing your "furnaces" on the wall under the shed if it was a wood fired barn. Typically two masonry [stone] furnaces to receive logs[corn & sweet taters for a snack if on duty firing at night]. The two masonry furnaces extended about 4' inside the barn where  12"-14" black metal flue pipes were connected and reached around the ground perimeter and rise-heated the tobacco hanging on the tier poles[where the black snake rested during off-season]. Thus the term flue-cured using horizontal flues.

 

Improperly strung[tied to sticks] partly cured tobacco would drop several leaves on a flue pipe and often catch fire when someone opened the door to check the temp and provided oxygen. Next to auto accidents the most prevalent fire call in our rural community. We always told the caller,"shut the door", it may be out when we arrive. If not, one application of a fog pattern would turn to steam and quickly smother it. 

 

Most flue-curing barns were narrowly vented at the ridge or eaves just enough to provide an upward draft of the heat. Post war oil fired barns had a smoke flue that exited the barn at ground mounted level and extended upward outside the barn [the hot pipe inside was a definite fire hazard].

 

My family bought one of the early kerosene-fired furnaces in late 1941. WWII curtailed the use of oil so the new unit rested in the horse barn while I was again assigned to chopping "flue wood" from deadfalls. We made sure "Lucky Strike Went To War", but on wood. They finally installed the oil fired system in 1949---two months after I went in the Navy to escape the farm.  

 

 

Very nice.

The few Kentucky barns I was in had an included, enclosed and heated "stripping

room", for which purpose I never really learned, but think it was to pull suckers or

scrap off the tobacco leaves, before or after hanging?  My grandfather would, while

the plants were in the field, do "worm picking", going through and crushing between

his fingers tobacco worms, that ate holes in the leaves.  Tobacco plants, like strawberries there, seemed to be finicky and hard to raise, having to first be put

out in seedling beds covered with cloth,  and then transplanted into the field. I

wonder where Plains Indians got tobacco for ceremonial pipe smoking since it seems hard to grow.  My other grandfather, a non smoker, said tobacco was a year around job and he would not do it, although, as a dairy farmer, he milked cows twice a day, 365 days a year, and the cows took no vacations.

 

 

 

 

not far from my wifes grandfathers farm

""furnaces" on the wall under the shed"

I bet i looked at 20 old abandoned tobacco barns and never saw that,  My wife told me that there was a small door on the side to check the kero burner?  I asked her about a chimney or a smoke stack and she said her grand dad did not have one, he had three barns and they used kero   (can anyone imagine them trying to do that today at 4 bucks a gallon for kero?)  I sure would like to see a photo of that

got this off internet

Most of Kentucky,East Tennessee the Virginia and North Carolina Mountain areas grew Burley tobacco. It was pretty much cropped the same as the Piedmont and Coastal Bright Leaf up until harvest time. Upon harvesting in Bright Leaf one picked [primed] the leaves as they began to ripen upward on the stalk. With Burley the entire stalk with leaves intact was cut off and hung in a board and batten shed to dry.

 

In Bright Leaf Grandma, other women[cooking crew] and the young kids "handed" bundles of three, or four leaves if small, to a "stringer" who operated at speed tying a bundle on one side of the stick and looped/flipped a second bundle over the stick to secure it opposite the aforementioned tied bundle. When full the stick was "housed" on the tier poles in the barn as the field crew returned to the barn from priming.

 

Usually one of the older primers would set up a stringer frame and help with that while a young "mule" type[me] was sent up on the tiers to begin housing aided by a couple of hands from the field. It was important to leave adequate space between the housed sticks on the first two or three tiers to allow heat to rise between them to the fourth.

 

 

Pelago

If you saw as many as 20 oil-fired barns I can't argue the point. It is very likely that they were post-1945 or had been upfitted for oil. Even in tobacco cropping and harvesting there are many ways to "skin a cat" and if during the wartime they had access to bulk oil there was a reason that should probably not be argued or addressed. We swapped work with as many as 12 other farms during all of WWII, some with 3 and 4 barns, none of which used oil or could get it in the volume needed. All of their barns, as with ours, had wood burning furnaces.

 

But in every case that I remember post war they eventually all knocked the head off their stone furnaces and closed in the foundation wall. By 1947 many abandoned their log barns in favor of oil-fired metal bulk curing barns. My uncle who stayed with the farm was one of those who went with a metal unit in 1949. I tore our log barns down in 1954. Others clad their wood fired log barns in board and batten or metal and the local oil dealer prospered.

 

Nevertheless within a 20 mile radius of my City Condo there still exist examples of wood fired barns, some restored but most abandoned and several showing evidence of closed in stone furnaces. 

 

Anyway your model is superb and my past experience has no bearing on your research and experience.

 

 

 

That looks really nice! I can't wait to see it painted!!!

Really nice job!

Pelago,

    Great job can't wait to see how you paint & weather it for the layout.

PCRR/Dave

Pelago,

Great model and photos.

Tobacco is part of American history and belongs in a railroad setting, as anywhere else.

My wife and kids would past tobacco farms on the backroads of Penna., visiting my wife's grandmother and one could smell the pleasant, sweetness of the tobacco.

Ralph

 

"Junk"

-battered or burnt out and rusty flue pipe. Appropriate junk whether a wood or oil fired barn.

 

-a tobacco slide[sled] or two. Some 10' long others 12' long.  A mule-drawn sled with a single tree on front. Basically a floor on rough sawn 2x8 runners and frame about 36' high with burlap sides. The field primers would lay the leaves in the sled as they accumulated an arm load while priming[or pick'in] with the other hand/arm. When full the sled would take a trip from field to barn and be unloaded on the "handing" table. Meantime the other mule and sled would be loading in the row[s]. 

 

-A dug hole and pile of clay[red or grey] that is used by wetting out and for dobbing between the logs to insulate.

 

-Planks on sawhorses for a "handing" table.

 

-A stringing frame slightly shorter than a tobacco stick. Vertical 1x6s,with V notches in the top to cradle a tobacco stick, nailed to a horizontal 1x6 foot board with braces at the bottom corners.

 

-Unruly tobacco twine lying about here and there.

 

 -If wood fired, a wood pile adjacent to the shed roof area. If oil-fired, an egg shaped fabricated tank or plain 50 gallon drum next to the barn.

 

-Any abandoned farm equipment horse or motor drawn--harrow, plow hay rake sycle mower,etc.

 

 

Tobacco, I think burley, is raised in southern Indiana, along the Oho River valley, and

I have seen tobacco growing on the Amish farms around Lancaster and Strasburg in Pa.

Always hard to reconcile Amish and tobacco.

During most of the 19th and 20th Century. tobacco[Burley and Bright Leaf], was an annual source of significant and scarce cash money. Rarely any cash from our grain crops or even surplus dairy on our farm which were used for food stuffs and stock feed. At home I don't ever recall having surplus corn, oats, wheat, etc, beyond our own use. However the Grain Mill often took payment as a share of product, in particular corn for bagged retail meal. [at times Dad would get some cash work on the A&Y Tie & Timber gang, mostly repairing trestles and short bridges].

 

A priority use of grain and dairy was feeding ourselves, the mules, horses, 5 or 6 milch cows and a horde of chickens and half dozen hogs. Mom often traded butter and eggs, occasionally a cured ham, at the Store and gave away much in the community during the Depression of the 1930s. 

 

We never had a tractor[ironically we have 4 tractors today and my son now grows zilch] and used the migrant thresher for grain and the local sawmill for cutting lumber from our timber.