The Ordering Pit, A Relict Feature of the Flue-Cured Tobacco Landscape

THE ORDERING PIT, A RELICT FEATURE OF THE FLUE-CURED TOBACCO LANDSCAPE John Morgan The landscape traditionally associated with the production of fluecured tobacco in the Southeastern United States is changing rapidly as a result of a change in marketing tobacco and a shift to mechanized systems of harvesting and curing. (1) Traditional curing barns, packhouses , and grading rooms are being abandoned and destroyed while new and different structures, such as bulk-curing barns and drive-in storage facilities, are becoming fixtures on the landscape. (2) One structural component of the landscape, the tobacco "ordering pit," is now a relict feature, having been rendered obsolete during the last decade. The ordering pit, a dirt-floored cellar, was utilized to bring cured tobacco into a state of "order" or pliableness in preparation for processing it for market. (3) This paper examines the ordering pit as a traditional element of the tobacco landscape and describes the processes responsible for its functional demise. The paucity of geographic research on agricultural structures was lamented in 1961 by John Fraser Hart and Eugene Cotton Mather. (4) Some research on agricultural structures has been carried out since then, but few works have dealt with structures associated with the growing and processing of flue-cured tobacco. (5) Because tobacco ordering pits are relicts disappearing from the landscape, the opportunity to make a comprehensive study of them is rapidly passing. The need to study relict features has been expressed by historical geographer H. C. Prince: (6) Relict features, however defined, may be studied for the contribution they make to the present landscape; as such, they are the concern of all geographers . . . In the study of the geography of the present time relict features have a special significance because they indicate the nature, extent, and rate of changes currently taking place. Ordering pits are common landscape features throughout the Old Flue-cured Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina, the Middle Mr. Morgan is a graduate student in the Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37916. Vol. XVIII, No. 2 103 FLUE -CURED TOBACCO BELTS OF VIRGINIA, NORTH CAROLINA AND SOUTH CAROLINA NORTH CAR Figure 1. The flue-cured tobacco belts of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Source: Adapted from map in Doub, Jr., and Crabtree, footnote 21, p. 9. Belt of North Carolina, and parts of the Eastern Belt of the state, and they are scattered through the Border Belt of North and South Carolina ( Fig. 1 ) . (7) The Old and Middle belts are located on the Piedmont and the Eastern and Border belts are on the Coastal Plain. Similar facilities are present on most tobacco farms in the Pennsylvania cigar districts and they are less commonly found in the New England cigar, Maryland broadleaf, North Carolina burley, and Virginia fire-cured and sun-cured districts. (8) 104Southeastern Geographer Figure 2. Ordering pit constructed under grading room ( attached to packhouse ) on Robert Pierce farm near Farmville, North Carolina. FORM AND FUNCTION. Flue-cured tobacco ordering pits are primarily of two types, substructures and self-contained pits ( Figs. 2 and 3). The majority of extant pits were constructed under packhouses or grading rooms. Self-contained pits, many of log construction, may have predominated early in this century in the Eastern Belt. Pits are usually about six to eight feet deep, and on the Coastal Plain they are about half above the surface. (9) Many of the substructures in the Piedmont , especially in the Old Belt, are almost entirely below ground level and often the clay walls of such pits are not lined. Nearly all of the pits on the Coastal Plain and some of those in the Piedmont have walls constructed of brick, concrete, or concrete block. Self-contained pits and many substructures have small outside doors, and nearly all substructures may be entered from the building above through a trapdoor . All pits have similar interior features, including an earthern floor and a lattice of racks similar to those under or near curing barn shelters (Fig. 4). The racks consist of a series of horizontal and vertical poles. The vertical poles extend from the ceiling to the earthen floor and Vol. XVIII, No. 2 105 Figure...