{"id":37155,"date":"2015-06-15T10:53:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T14:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=37155"},"modified":"2022-09-28T10:33:53","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T14:33:53","slug":"tobacco-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2015\/06\/15\/tobacco-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Tobacco road"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Drew<\/a>

\u201cA Golden Weed: Tobacco and the Environment in the Piedmont South,\u201d a new book by Drew Swanson, an assistant history professor at Wright State, was named the year\u2019s best book on agricultural history by the Agricultural History Society. (Photos by Erin Pence)<\/p><\/div>\n

The seed was planted with the boy during a walk through the woods on his grandparents\u2019 Virginia farm. A deep gully in the red clay that cut through the pines was a telltale sign of careless tobacco farming on fragile soil.<\/p>\n

That early memory for Drew Swanson, Ph.D., now an assistant history<\/a> professor at Wright State University, grew to a gnawing curiosity about the history of tobacco growing and how its successes and failures came to shape his boyhood home.<\/p>\n

And that curiosity has produced \u201cA Golden Weed: Tobacco and the Environment in the Piedmont South<\/a>,\u201d named by the Agricultural History Society as the year\u2019s best book on agricultural history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope the book will complicate Southern history a little bit,\u201d said Swanson, who joined the faculty at Wright State in 2013 and has taught courses that include U.S. history, Appalachian history and environmental history. \u201cAnd maybe it can be a cautionary tale when we\u2019re feeling complacent about our pursuit of sustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swanson grew up on a small farm near Roanoke, Va. His father still farms and is also a Southern Baptist minister and semi-retired high school English teacher.<\/p>\n

Swanson was initially interested in a career in forestry or the outdoors, so he got his bachelor\u2019s degree in biology from Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, N.C. After graduation, he worked as a park ranger at Grandfather Mountain, which is part of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did trail construction, law enforcement, studied endangered species,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only problem is you are ice- and snowbound for much of the winter. I got a little stir crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Swanson decided to return to academia and got his master\u2019s degree in history from Appalachian State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, where he studied environmental history.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Golden Weed\u201d sprang from Swanson\u2019s dissertation at Georgia and his postdoctoral fellowship at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.<\/p>\n

Swanson wanted to unearth the history of the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina to figure out how it had gone from a wealthy, tobacco-farming region to a largely impoverished landscape and population.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I found was a horrible irony that during these steps on the road to poverty, the farmers thought they were doing something sustainable,\u201d he said. \u201cThey genuinely viewed their tobacco crops \u2014 a particular variety called Bright Leaf, which is the core ingredient for cigarettes in the 20th century \u2014 as something that would give them a sustainable lifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Drew<\/a>

In “A Golden Weed,” Drew Swanson unearths the history of the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina and how it went from a wealthy, tobacco-farming region to a largely impoverished landscape and population.<\/p><\/div>\n

While Bright Leaf performed well in soil whose fertility had been significantly depleted by previous tobacco varieties, the soil continued to erode. And by the time farmers began relying on synthetic fertilizer in the late 1800s, it was too late.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen it becomes the classic Southern story \u2014 reliance on a commodity crop, debt peonage, an inability to sustain your situation,\u201d Swanson said. \u201cThey largely destroyed the landscapes they relied on. They still raise tobacco in portions of this region today, but they do it with really high fertilizer inputs and a lot of spraying so that the profits are very low.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swanson began research on the book in 2006, looking for answers in archives, microfilm, book collections, letters, diaries, daybooks and farm journals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a history looking from the tobacco field outward, exploring farmers\u2019 views of the world,\u201d Swanson writes. \u201cIt is an effort to take their claims and their environmental understandings as seriously as they did and to recover a world that has been all but lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swanson was surprised at how much money could be made by growing tobacco.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was the potential to become genuinely rich if you put all of the pieces together,\u201d he said. \u201cOne farmer in 1856 reportedly made the equivalent of 30 years\u2019 salary in one year. There was a bit of this Gold Rush fever, this lottery fever that inspired farmers and made them a little crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

One newspaper even put a local farmer\u2019s big tobacco crop on the front page and buried on Page 2 the historic news of John Brown\u2019s raid on Harper\u2019s Ferry, an attempt by the white abolitionist to start an armed slave revolt by seizing an arsenal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a story of the rise of a crop culture, but it is also a tale of the decline of the environment that accompanied this form of tobacco cultivation, from severe erosion to deforestation to insect infestations,\u201d Swanson writes.<\/p>\n

In addition to the Agricultural History Society honor, Swanson won the Ohio Academy of History\u2019s 2015 Publication Award for junior faculty at Ohio universities.<\/p>\n

He hopes the book is a lesson for the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that pursuit of sustainability is bad, but our understanding of sustainability is always incomplete,\u201d he said. \u201cSo we can end up in weird places out of good intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New book by Drew Swanson, an assistant history professor at Wright State, was named the year\u2019s best book on agricultural history by the Agricultural History Society.
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