Saving tobacco barns before the door closes

GAMBRILLS, Md. - “We harvested tobacco in August when I was a girl,” says 72-year-old Mildred Anderson, mistress of Middle Plantation in Gambrills, in Anne Arundel County, “and hung the leaf floor-to-rooftop inside that big red barn over there.”

That was then. Today very few farmers cultivate what was once called Maryland’s “money crop” — tobacco.

Three years ago almost all of Maryland’s approximately 1,000 tobacco farmers accepted a state-sponsored buy-out that made many of the region’s nearly 5,000 tobacco barns instantly obsolete.

Many of those old barns stand unused and deteriorating. Hundreds simply have vanished into wooden heaps on the ground, or have been demolished as the widening arc of Washington’s suburbs consumes the region’s agricultural land.

Mrs. Anderson testifies to that as she remembers the raising of her big red barn, built because the family’s first barn couldn’t handle the bumper crops.

“I remember the day my father started building it — it was July 1950, when the Korean War was just being declared — and we only had the tobacco barn built right after the Civil War, which was too small,” she says.

“‘Course, today we use them both for the cattle, and hay and small grains storage. Nobody does tobacco any more.”

So many farmers don’t “do” tobacco any more that in May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the tobacco barns of southern Maryland as among America’s most endangered historic resources.

The irony is that tobacco was the economic engine that brought the first European settlers to the state’s southern counties, this land watered by the Potomac and Patuxent rivers and bordered on the east by the Chesapeake Bay.

More ironic still is the fact that the Algonquin word “patuxent” is thought to have meant “place where tobacco grows.”

The National Trust’s “endangered” designation applies to barns in Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties, as well as Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties.

What makes these barns unique, the Trust says, is one important thing: “Southern Maryland tobacco was air-cured, while growers in Virginia, the Carolinas and Kentucky implemented flue (heat) curing methods that resulted in barn construction very different from southern Maryland barns.”

The Trust’s designation doesn’t guarantee survival or funding for the barns’ safekeeping, but typically helps communities raise funds and build coalitions to protect the resource.

It also provides entrance to the congressionally created Historic Barn Preservation Program of 2002, which is intended to promote continued agricultural use of older and historic barns.

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