Well, you have to go back to the North Carolina farm economy, which made
another major transition. North Carolina and most southeastern states
were cotton states prior to World War One. Now, immediately after World
War One — 1921, exactly, it got to North Carolina — came the boll
weevil. The boll weevil practically eradicated cotton. For all intents
and purposes, it became impossible to grow. We saw a movement of
agriculture. The counties that had grown tobacco in North Carolina, you
don't even think of as agricultural counties today. They were Guilford,
Forsyth, Granville, Person, Wake, Durham. These were the counties that
grew tobacco. The eastern counties grew cotton. With the invention of
the and the great improvement of the cigarette machine, which was
Page 7the thing that made smoking popular and picked up
more than fifty percent of the [smoking] population in women—. No matter
how bad you wanted a cigarette, in 1912 it just wasn't very exciting to
get out a piece of paper and dump some tobacco in it and lick it and
twist the ends together and start smoking. You might have been in an
unsophisticated business, but that wasn't a very elegant way to approach
something. That's the way you smoked a cigarette if you wanted one. You
got that paper out and poured the tobacco in it and licked it and
twisted it and had a cigarette. Golden Grain and RJR, that was the
tobacco business. But all of a sudden with the cigarette rolling
machine—. It was, I think, invented in Switzerland but dominated by
Duke. He controlled the machine and the use of it and the manufacturing
and everything else. He acquired all of the tobacco companies in the
world. Literally, all of them. [It is] not an overstatement. He had them
all. So all of a sudden, instead of getting out a little sack of tobacco
and rolling a cigarette, it became very elegant to bring out a very well
designed pack, and all you had to do was light the end of it. If they'd
never had invented the cigarette rolling machine and everybody had to
roll a cigarette by hand, you'd have never heard the furor over tobacco
because, hell it took so long to roll one, nobody'd have ever smoked
any. In fact, it may be a southern saying, but a vernacular that we used
on cigarettes for many, many years, you've probably never heard. They
were never referred to as "cigarettes." They were known as "ready
rolls." A "cigarette" was something you made with your hands, and a
factory made cigarette was known as a "ready roll." But anyway, that's
what the tobacco industry [did]. So then the eastern [part of the state]
having more desirable agriculture land and this massive demand for
tobacco, it just exploded with the cigarette machine and the end of
World War Two. Tobacco replaced
Page 8cotton. Tobacco came
in just in time. The explosive use of tobacco supplemented and then took
over cotton [farming]. Certain sections of North Carolina all of a
sudden got into the produce business pretty heavily. It's hard to
realize but fresh vegetables and produce sections of stores were an
unknown item forty years ago, fifty years ago, sixty years ago. A
grocery store carried a few in-season, locally-grown produce. If you
wanted some in the winter, you canned it. Except for a very, very few,
very, very wealthy people, that was produce. Maybe three percent of the
population or one percent, more likely, had access to vegetables and
fruit other than in the immediate season that they lived. At the turn of
the century and on into World War One, fresh vegetables were unknown.
The fruit and vegetable business really began to pick up after World War
Two. People had traveled. The standard of living [improved]. They came
back and they were not willing to go back into farming. They went to
colleges by massive amounts and took jobs not related to agriculture. So
all of a sudden there was a demand for produce, which has continued to
grow to this day. So many types of produce that used to be strictly
local items, all of a sudden — even in the last twenty-five years — have
become nationwide and highly accepted and highly sought after. That
business has grown throughout the state and particularly in this area.
There will probably be fifteen thousand acres of bell pepper here [this
year]. It's going out by the truckloads [and] trainloads every day. The
same thing's true with all sorts of cucumbers and corn and that type of
thing. You've got a whole new market. Then there's a different type of
produce that the state has grown in rapidly. Leaf vegetables, sweet
potatoes, collards, [these] used to be absolutely a redneck, welfare
dish. There is a farmer here in the county that has twenty-five hundred
acres of them on a continuing basis and cannot supply the market. I
noticed
Page 9very elegant restaurants in New York have
them. They use the French word, choux, for them. It's actually a French
vegetable [that was] brought here by French settlers. Sweet potatoes, it
used to be you could not give one away north of Richmond. Today it's a
highly accepted health food and distributed nationwide. So we've seen
the growth of that. Now cotton moved to the west to Arizona, California
because they did not have the boll weevil, and the boll weevil could not
survive [there]. The boll weevil requires continuous moist ground to
hatch. The eggs are laid in square drops on the ground, and it's the
moisture of the ground keeps it alive, and the heat hatches it, and
you've got another boll weevil. Well in the deserts of Arizona and
California, you watered the cotton once every ten days and when you cut
the water off, there was no chance for a boll weevil to survive until
you watered again, and he can't hatch in one day. It takes about ten
days so there were no boll weevils. There were massive amounts of free
government water. Massive amounts of free government water pumped into
that whole southwestern area. So now we come back, the boll weevil has
for all intents and purposes been eradicated. Now, this area, this
county—. This is true all over, you can just multiply it twenty-five or
thirty times. It went from absolute no cotton to this year, it's going
to have one hundred thousand acres in this county. Raising it's cheap.
It's the ideal country to grow it in. [There's] no irrigation, dry
falls, two, two and a half bales to the acre, better than California or
Arizona. But now the pressure's on there for the vegetables and the land
and water for recreational and other uses, so they will eventually get
out of the cotton business. It will move back here.