Description

Piedmont Culture: A Pictorial History of Folk Life in the Virginia Foothills

The aim of this book is to capture the essence of rural life and the unique tobacco culture that thrives within the Virginia Piedmont region of the United States. The content explores personal documentations of history that center around tobacco farming families whose lineage can be traced back to the earliest settlements in Virginia. Although remnants of tobacco farming culture are scattered all across the state, the heart is still found in the southern Piedmont region of Virginia. The fields of bright leaf are what largely developed the towns of Lynchburg, Martinsville, Danville, South Boston, Farmville, and small communities in the surrounding countryside.

This is a passion project and academic commentary on the past that is primarily based on historic written correspondence, historic photographs, surviving architecture, and surviving traditions. It’s not meant to be a complete collection of all aspects of the culture, but rather a contextual narrative by someone with deep roots in the area. Entire communities of rural Virginians share strong and complex family bonds to their particular county and communities. For generations, descendants continue to live on the same land as their ancestors with a similar and familiar slow-paced lifestyle. Along the old country roads, there are old hand-hewn log home places, secret fieldstone cemeteries in the woods, and countless tobacco barns with the unmistakable sweet scent still lingering. Some sort of remnant from the 19th century often serves as a proud relic of their family’s recent history as yeoman farmers. In many cases, tobacco farmers trace their family’s tobacco farming roots in Virginia back over three hundred years.

The Piedmont is a vast region directly west of the coastal Tidewater region but east of the mountainous Blue Ridge. Some locations retain a mystical feeling of vast, unexplored country. Thick forests envelop the many ancient rivers and creeks. Pastures of cattle and fields of crops pattern the rolling hills like a quilt. No roads exist through the vastness other than those pathways worn into the ground by lines of hooves upon their daily routines, much like the ancient wood buffalo through the same lands.

These types of historic ties to the land are what inspired the research for this book. While other settlers moved west to manifest something greater, some stayed in Virginia and endeavored to improve the raising and curing of tobacco. General histories of the U.S. often portray farming tobacco as an eighteenth century phenomenon, and for the most part tobacco is not referenced extensively thereafter. As a result, unless a person has lived in an area that farms tobacco, generally they would not be introduced to any knowledge of its cultivation. The truth is that the art is very much still alive and has an elaborate culture worth documenting and sharing.