L. Hawks, _History
of North Carolina_ (Fayetteville, N.C., 1857, 1858), II, 215, 216.]
Tobacco culture, while requiring severe exertion only at a few crises,
involved a long painstaking routine because of the delicacy of the plant
and the difficulty of producing leaf of good quality, whether of the
original varieties, oronoko and sweet-scented, or of the many others later
developed. The seed must be sown in late winter or early spring in a
special bed of deep forest mold dressed with wood ashes; and the fields
must be broken and laid off by shallow furrows into hills three or four
feet apart by the time the seedlings were grown to a finger's length. Then
came the first crisis. During or just after an April, May or June rain the
young plants must be drawn carefully from their beds, distributed in the
fields, and each plant set in its hill. Able-bodied, expert hands could set
them at the rate of thousands a day; and every nerve must be strained for
the task's completion before the ground became dry enough to endanger the
seedlings' lives. Then began a steady repetition of hoeings and plowings,
broken by the rush after a rain to replant the hills whose first plants had
died or grown twisted.
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