The Greenfield Barn

The barn standing in the field on this Maury County ridge was built for Leland Greenfield in 1959, out of timber grown on the farm itself. Greenfield had raised his first tobacco crop on the ground in 1932, and his family had owned it for a hundred years by the time the State of Tennessee bought the farm and deeded it to the Natchez Trace Parkway in 1977. What grew on the ridge was burley, the pale leaf that is air cured rather than cured over fire, and it hung in this barn for four to six weeks before it was ready for market. The Park Service reckons an acre of it took about two hundred and fifty hours of labour. An acre of wheat took three. It was a crop that paid for the labour and very little else.

Burley is a different crop from the dark-fired tobacco of the counties north and west, around Robertson and Montgomery, which is cured over smouldering hardwood and went into snuff and chewing tobacco. Burley went into cigarettes. Middle Tennessee took it up in a westward spread of the burley belt that began in 1924, and from the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 until the federal buyout of 2004 a quota attached to each farm fixed how much of it that farm could grow. Air curing is a matter of managing weather rather than heat: leaf that dries too fast stays green and leaf that dries too slowly rots, so a barn like this one is opened and shut all autumn.