Central Tobacco: 1906

The young fellow sitting high on the hog(shead), was probably a roller, making a few nickels by rolling the empties outside for pickup by the deliverymen for refill.

Winston Salem is my home town. The best summer jobs to be found were connected to the tobacco industry. I worked for RJ Reynolds for 3 summers. The smell was unforgettable. But, good times!

This is what Central Tobacco looks like today! Man I had to do a lot of digging, but now I'm certain. This is Main Street between 10th and 11th. Woot!

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I grew up in Burlington, NC, near Winston Salem (guess what's made there!), and this photo brings back the smell of the tobacco operations in the late 50's -- not offensive, just pervasive. We learned early on about hogsheads of tobacco and their importance to the economy in Colonial times and thereafter.

are still around in some Southern towns. By the mid 50s, most of them had been replaced by metal buildings, but some brick markets were in use until fairly recently. I can remember seeing trucks piled with those hogsheads pulling out from the markets when I was a child. The tobacco was left to age for, I believe, 5 years until broken open and processed. Although I personally detest smoking, until the gov't put the badmouth on it, tobacco was a major industry in the South.

Such a sign of the times for that era. Aren't those quite large hogshead barrels? WOW!

According to Wikipedia, each one of those hogsheads weighs about 1,000 pounds. A lot of hard work movings those hogsheads around. I wish I could think of another way to use the word hogshead.

"A tobacco hogshead was used in American colonial times to transport and store tobacco. It was a very large wooden barrel. A standardized hogshead measured 48 inches (1,219 mm) long and 30 inches (762 mm) in diameter at the head (at least 550 L/121 imp gal; 145 US gal, depending on the width in the middle). Fully packed with tobacco, it weighed about 1,000 pounds (454 kg)."