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'Tobacco
wives' share their memories
– on the farm and in the
marketplace
INTERVIEWS BY GARY RIDOUT for the
Smithfield Weekly Sun
AUTHOR'S NOTE: On Highway 301 between Holt Lake
and Smithfield, there currently are seven
one-story very large buildings. A growing number
of people in the area have no idea why these
buildings were originally built. They now serve as
storage facilities, general warehouses, and flea
markets. Just 30 years ago they were bustling
centers of commerce for the grading and auctioning
of tobacco in Johnston County. That all ended in
the late 1990s. The following is another unique
aspect of tobacco commerce in the South and around
the world: “Tobacco Wives.”
Here are transcripts of Gary's interviews with
three of them:
JENNIFER FOY
I really didn’t learn much about tobacco as a crop
or business until I married my husband, Eddie Foy.
I was somewhat familiar with tobacco as I was
growing up because my father, J. Phil Campbell
Jr., was Commissioner of Agriculture for the State
of Georgia. I always knew a little about the
tobacco crop and the sale of tobacco because of
his familiarity with it. He moved on from that
position to be Under Secretary of Agriculture in
the Richard Nixon administration in 1969....
In Georgia, I went to public school until the
seventh grade. In the eighth grade, I went to a
girl’s preparatory boarding school for girls
called Brenau Academy in Gainesville, Georgia.
Riverside School for boys was nearby, so luckily
we could ride the bus over there and talk to the
boys on the weekends. We all moved to Washington
in 1969 when I was in the 11th grade.
 I met my
husband, Eddie, in my sophomore year at the
University of Georgia in 1973. There was an
exchange program for students to go the
Netherlands. We went to a large classroom to learn
about the program and when I walked in, this young
man caught my eye. There sat Eddie looking cool
and smoking a cigarette. He had one foot propped
up on the window sill. Eddie and I went to the
Netherlands with the University of Georgia group
and grew to be close friends. We were married in
1976.
We moved to Smithfield in 1976 and Eddie worked as
a trainee for K.R. Edwards Leaf Tobacco Company.
K. R. Edwards was a subsidiary of Universal Leaf
Tobacco Company in Richmond, Virginia. Soon after
we moved to Smithfield, both of us went on the
tobacco market across Georgia and North Carolina.
The warehouse managers were very happy to have the
wives accompany their husbands because we would do
bookkeeping work in the warehouse and record the
sales of the tobacco. I was part of a group of
tobacco wives who did this behind-the-scenes
office work.
The tobacco was brought into the warehouse by the
farmers in huge burlap sheets and then the sheets
would be opened and the piles were arranged in
rows. It was fun to watch the sale process. The
auctioneer would walk slowly down the row and the
buyers would follow and bid on each pile or sheet
of tobacco. The group moving down the row was made
up of four types of people: the auctioneer, the
farmers, the recorder, and the buyers. The
auctioneers were very talented and would actually
“sing” the prices as the group moved down the row.
Carl Lamm, who was with WMPM at that time, would
report on the sales to his listeners. He
nicknamed one of the auctioneers, Edward
Stephenson, “The Dixie Hummingbird” because of his
melodic auctioneer voice.
These sales would last from mid-August of each
year until the end of September so the warehouses
were bustling places during this six-week period.
There was so much cured tobacco moving through the
warehouses that a fragrant aroma filled the air in
and around the warehouses.
In the late 1970s, my husband, Eddie, was named a
tobacco buyer for K. R. Edwards Leaf Tobacco
Company. I was no longer in the tobacco warehouse
office area recording sales. My role as a tobacco
wife was to keep the household going while he
traveled around the nation and to various
countries around the world with the tobacco
market. I did, however, enjoy traveling with him
several times in connection with the tobacco
company.
From 1978 to 1980, I traveled with him for short
periods through Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
During these years I also went to Mexico for short
visits while he worked there. From 1989 to 1998 I
traveled with him to Denmark, Poland, Austria,
Germany and Belgium. One of the highlights
in 1995 was when I accompanied Eddie on a trip to
Nice, France. We took a boat ride to the small
country of Monaco where we watched the Grand Prix
of Monaco. We then went on to England where we saw
Tiger Woods in the World Match Play Competition.
Eddie sometimes would be gone from the family for
a month or more at a time. During this time, we
had three children, so it was necessary to stay at
home with them. Eddie Jr. was born in 1979,
Charlie was born in 1981, and Phil was born in
1984. As a stay-at-home mom, I got to know other
tobacco wives in Smithfield.
Ann Stephenson, another tobacco wife, became a
great friend because she understood the times of
loneliness and being a temporary single parent.
She also had three children. Through the K.R.
Edwards company, we got to know a wonderful
babysitter and home partner named Seretha
Blackwell. Seretha helped me tremendously because
I was alone for long periods of time with the
children and needed the assistance.
In 1996, Eddie and I moved to Richmond, Virginia
where he became president of Universal Leaf
tobacco Company. This meant less travel and
somewhat more prestige.
As I look back on being a tobacco wife, it
certainly had its advantages and disadvantages. I
got to see the world but also had long months of
loneliness. I guess it all adds up to some success
in the end.
MARY DAUGHTRY
Before becoming a “tobacco wife” in 1984, I grew
up around tobacco. My father was a tobacco farmer
in Johnston County. As a child, I remember going
with him at night to check on the tobacco barns.
After the tobacco was harvested, it had to be
cured in barns that at that time were heated by
wood stoves. We would go out to check on the fires
to ensure that the proper temperature for curing
was being maintained. The barn temperature was
supposed to be 130 degrees for proper curing.
These barns were later replaced by bulk tobacco
barns heated by propane gas.
 My
husband, Billy Daughtry, and I grew up five miles
apart but never knew each other until
adulthood. His home is near Brogden
and mine is Pine Level. He got a job with K. R.
Edwards Tobacco Company in August 1979, when he
was 19. Early on, before we were married, Billy
was accustomed to traveling with the company. In
November 1979 he was sent to Lexington, Kentucky
to work at a burley tobacco plant. In the spring
of 1980, Billy worked in at a tobacco green-leaf
storage facility for four months.
A few months later, in August 1980, Billy was
assigned to Dunn, North Carolina to work in a
tobacco warehouse. This is where we met. I was a
freshman at Campbell College and a friend
introduced us. Our first date was influenced by
tobacco. Billy was supposed to pick me up for a
dinner date at 7 p.m. At 6:55 the phone in my dorm
room rang. “Hi, I’m Roy Tew, a tobacco warehouse
owner here in Dunn. He is going to be there to
pick you up. He is running a little late. Billy
has had a truckload of tobacco to hit a bridge
abutment on I-95. He’s gone out there to get it
cleaned up.”
I thought “late” meant 7:30. It did not. It meant
9:00! I was upset. Billy had gone home, taken a
shower and he smelled good, but I was still not
happy. To make me feel better, he bought me a
great steak at Heath’s Steak House. Heath’s was
the place to eat in 1980. We still go back to eat
at Heath’s for our wedding anniversary.
At Thanksgiving of that year, Billy was sent to
London, Kentucky to work in the shipping
department of a burley tobacco warehouse. He was
assigned in Kentucky until February 1981. He
was then sent back to Mexico and worked there
until July 1981. From August 1981 until July 1982
he was a tobacco buyer and worked in Aberdeen,
Carthage, and Sanford, North Carolina.
From September until December, 1982 he was a
tobacco buyer on the burley market in Madison,
Indiana. In the spring of 1983 he again worked in
Mexico where he stayed until July 1983. In
the late summer and fall of 1983, he was a buyer
in Wallace, North Carolina.
From December 1983 until March 1984, he was burley
tobacco buyer again in Madison, Indiana. This was
followed by a Mexico assignment from May through
July 1984. Billy and I got married in July 1984.
In the tobacco business with all this travel, we
had to plan ahead, so Billy had told me in July
1983 that we would be married in 12 months and he
would work out the vacation time.
Soon after we were married, he was again assigned
to the warehouse in Wallace. Billy would go to
Wallace on Sunday afternoons because they started
tobacco sales early on Monday morning.
The tobacco people in Wallace would sometimes have
suppers at the warehouse for everyone. It was very
informal and there was a lot of fellowship and
great food. The group included tobacconists,
buyers, and farmers. Billy and I made many friends
with the tobacco people and their families. We are
still friends 35 years later. I would go to
Wallace on a Tuesday night for supper and leave
for school early the next morning.
After Billy’s stint in Wallace he went to London,
Kentucky on the burley tobacco market from
November 1984 until February 1985. He then worked
in Mexico from March until July 1985. In the
summer of 1988, I made my first trip to Mexico
where Billy was working. It was a fascinating and
sometimes depressing place to be. I first flew to
Puerto Vallarta to spend the weekend with Billy
before we went to his work assignment. Puerto
Vallarta is a beautiful Mexican resort area with
some of the best food anywhere.
After we left the resort, we drove to the small
town of Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico where Billy worked.
We drove for three hours through poverty-stricken
Mexican villages. Each village had a speed bump in
its center. When we slowed down for the speed
bump, little Mexican boys would run out and
surround our car wanting to wash our car windows.
They were barefooted and shirtless. We would
always let them wash the windows and we would pay
them. The boys also sold individual “Chic-lets”
chewing gum to make money. The further inland you
drove, the more poverty you saw. It was an
eye-opening experience for me, very different from
Pine Level.
Later in 1988, Billy was working in Maysville,
Kentucky and I was pregnant with our first child,
Tyler. My mother and father decided it would be
good to have Thanksgiving in Maysville. There we
sat eating our Thanksgiving dinner at the buffet
in the Ramada Inn. It was my first time being in
Maysville and my parents first time ever being
away from home on Thanksgiving. On Friday after
Thanksgiving, we drove to Lexington to see the
horse farms. Everyone thought they were so
beautiful. Tobacco helped get us out of Johnston
County.
In the fall of 1989, I took the year off from
teaching and we rented a small garage apartment in
Maysville. The Clarks were our landlords. They
could not have been kinder to a young mother. Mrs.
Clark babysat for our six-month-old son and Mr.
and Mrs. Clark were always asking what they could
do to help us. They even invited us to go to
church on Sunday and then have a delicious dinner
afterward.
That winter in Maysville, Kentucky was very
memorable for this tobacco wife. As a life-long
resident of Pine Level, I did not know what a
Kentucky winter was like. When Billy came home
from the market one day the week after
Thanksgiving, I looked out and saw 10 inches of
snow. We had to go to a department store to buy
snow boots and gloves to make it through the
brutal winter.
We went back to Johnston County for Christmas and
drove through very cold weather. We made it to a
Holiday Inn Wytheville, Virginia at 11:00 that
night. The heat in room did not work well and we
spent the coldest night of our lives there. At
2:00 in the morning, I picked up my six-month-old
son from his crib and put him in the bed between
us. I was afraid he would freeze! At 6 a.m., Billy
stood up and said, “Put your clothes on. The car
has a heater and we are going home!”
The weather continued to be a factor because in
Maysville it was so cold that the pipes in our
garage apartment had frozen and burst. Mr. and
Mrs. Clark had spent days fixing the apartment so
we could return. Mrs. Clark called and said “I
can’t let you bring that baby back until this
place is fixed!” Luckily, they worked so hard that
everything was right when we got back. They were
nice landlords for tobacco people.
The hardest part of being a tobacco wife was the
long weeks of being a single parent. When I was up
by myself late at night with a crying baby, I
would console myself by saying that financially
this will pay off in the long term. We were able
to purchase a starter home much earlier than many
of our friends. I did watch my husband lament that
he was missing many of the activities the children
were involved in. He really wanted to be a T-ball
coach, but could not because of the travel
schedule.
One of the advantages was that I was able to
confide in other tobacco wives. Susan Johnson was
a great friend because her husband was also
traveling with the tobacco market. My parents were
also a great support and I have always appreciated
what they did while I was alone with two small
children.
Billy left the K.R. Edwards company in July 1992
and went to work for a British tobacco company
named Gallaher. The travel times required for
Gallaher were similar to what I had been
accustomed to, but the destinations were very
different. The company was based in Weybridge,
England. Billy would be required to go all over
the world. Some of the work sites were Canada,
Brazil, Columbia, Italy, Greece, and Sri Lanka.
The work locations and the pace of the job caused
Billy and me to do a lot of thinking.
My time frame that began in 1984 as a tobacco wife
ended in 1999 when Billy resigned his Gallaher
position. He and I decided to buy a small grocery
store in Pine Level. We named it “The Town
Market.” Our children were 10 and six. There are
many ways to live your life. Being a tobacco wife
was certainly a fascinating way to spend that 15
years.
BECKY WHITLEY
 I married
Charlie Whitley in 1969. We were married for 43
years (he passed away in 2011). When we
moved out to this house off Brogden Road, our
family and the extended family were a genuine
tobacco-farming group. We started out with 20
acres of tobacco. Over the years it expanded to 60
acres and now this farm grows 300 acres of
tobacco.
When I
first moved to this house to begin my tobacco-wife
career, I sometimes said: "What am I doing?” We
had no air conditioning and no television, but I
made do and learned to appreciate the farming
life. Air conditioning and a television were
installed in a few months and I was very grateful.
As a
child, I was exposed to tobacco farming because my
grandparents were tobacco farmers. I saw
first-hand the hard work that farmers do. My
mother even joked with me and said: "You said you
would never marry a farmer!"
Tobacco
farming in the 1960s and 1970s was on a pretty
rigid schedule and still is. Things change if the
weather does not cooperate, but generally there
was a yearly tobacco schedule.
In February and March, we would plant tobacco
seeds in beds that were covered with plastic to
shield them from freezing weather. These tobacco
seed beds were generally one-fourth to one-half an
acre.
In April we would take the tobacco seedlings in
boxes and use a tobacco planter to set them in the
fields. The tobacco planter could plant four rows
at a time. Four people sat in chairs at the back
of the planter and fed the seedlings into
mechanized clips that push the seedlings into the
soil. Because the seedlings were small and
somewhat fragile, the rows had to be hoed or
chopped to remove aggressive grasses and other
weeds.
Sometimes the weather was very hot and Mrs.
Whitley, my mother-in-law, and I would really
suffer chopping the weeds. If the weather was dry
in June, July, and August, we would irrigate the
tobacco plants. We had irrigation pipes attached
to ponds throughout the farm. We could irrigate
four rows at a time.
Also in the summer months, we had to “sucker” the
tobacco plants. Suckers were small leaves that if
left unchecked would impede the larger leaves from
growing and maturing. The tobacco plants would
also flower in the summer months and we would have
to “top” them to remove the flowers. If the
flowers were not removed, the leaves would not
mature to market size.
Another issue in the growing season was tobacco
hornworms. These large green caterpillars are
voracious feeders. Two hornworm larvae are
capable of completely defoliating a tobacco plant.
In late June and early July we would begin the
harvesting and burning process. This is the
process that would go on until September. In the
early days, schools would not start until children
were finished helping their parents with the
tobacco harvest. This was usually early
September. As our acreage grew, harvesting would
take longer.
 Sometimes
we were harvesting and curing tobacco until
mid-October. The first leaves to be harvested are
called “lugs.” They were not the same quality as
the leaves that are higher up on the tobacco
plant. The leaves would be placed in curing barns
to prepare them for market. Tobacco buyers wanted
a very pliable yellow leaf.
Originally, tobacco being prepared to be cured was
a large group effort. The picture shows people 50
years ago tying the leaves in preparation for
curing.
 The tall
structure (in the picture) is the barn
where the tobacco was heated and cured. The low
shed is where groups of people would work to bind
the tobacco leaves onto the sticks which were then
hoisted up into the tall barn. There were people
called “handers.” They would
gather up a group of four or five tobacco leaves
to be tied to the tobacco stick. The leaves would
be then be handed to the “stringer," who would
wrap tobacco twine around the leaves and tie it to
the stick. This had to be done precisely so the
tobacco leaves did not fall off the stick. The
stick would then be handed to someone who would
climb up into the rafters and place the sticks on
the rafters.
The
tobacco would stay in the barn curing for three
days.... The heat in the curing barns
would transform the green leaves of the tobacco
plant into the very valuable cured leaf....
 We had (to
rely) on young people to do the farm work. The
picture shows a group of boys taking a much-needed
break....
A 100-year-old house (is where) some of our youth
lived over the summer. A single mother in Virginia
would send her four teen-aged sons to our farm to
work. She was thrilled with the money that they
made. They cooked and slept in this house during
the summer months. Then we would pay them and
drive them back to Virginia.
The tobacco harvesting process has changed
dramatically over the last 50 years and is now
more mechanical. Human work hours have been
drastically reduced....
The process of monitoring the harvesting and the
curing of the leaves is a very time-consuming and
stressful thing. Farmers and farmers' wives do not
get much sleep during this time. Some barns have
to be checked through the night to make sure
everything is right.
As a
tobacco wife, the tobacco market was sort of a
mystery to me. It was a man’s world. There were 15
or 20 rows of tobacco in burlap sheets in the
warehouse. On occasion, I would listen to the
tobacco auctioneer shouting out prices and
directions as the buyers walked down the line. My
greatest joy when I went to the warehouses was the
wonderful aroma of the tobacco leaves. My greatest
hope was the dream that we would be able to sell the
tobacco, pay our bills, and make enough for a
savings account.
Mid-and-late October were wonderful days for tobacco
wives and their families. The crops had been
harvested, bills could be paid, and everyone could
rest in a normal way. No more checking curing barns
through the night and working seven days a week to
ensure the crops were healthy. Much had been
accomplished. There is a reason for the Thanksgiving
holiday. It was a time to be grateful.
As a tobacco-farm wife, I grew to be thankful that
it required the family to work together for good. I
think that is a great requirement for all families.
I made sure my sons got out on Saturday morning and
worked on the farm. They did not watch cartoons.
They contributed to the family success.
Another thing I learned to be thankful for was the
land. We took care of the land and passed that love
on to our children.
I will sum it up by saying it was a hard life but a
good life. I have a great appreciation for God. When
you plant a small seed and see the beauty as it
grows, it helps you treasure the world we live in.
Sometimes I have walked out into the fields and been
overwhelmed by the vision that is before me.
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