Trial by fire: A newcomer’s introduction to Western Kentucky

Nearly 60 years ago, one late summer or early autumn day, my father drove alone from Hopkinsville to Princeton for a meeting. We were newcomers to Western Kentucky — and like many who take their first drive through the countryside in this end of the state, my father noticed a barn on fire. Or so he thought.

He pulled off Princeton Road and drove to a farmhouse to tell someone about their trouble.

To hear him tell the story back then, he had stopped at three or four farms before someone told him that none of those barns were actually burning. They held dark-fired tobacco that was being cured by the smoke of smoldering hardwood, usually oak or hickory planks, beneath sawdust spread across the barn’s dirt floor.

This was all new to my father, who grew up in West Virginia and East Tennessee. We came to Hopkinsville from Memphis in 1966.

I thought of that old memory and my family’s introduction to Western Kentucky farm traditions when I read a story this week in The Murray Sentinel about a tobacco farmer.

The Sentinel and Hoptown Chronicle have a lot in common, both being independent, nonprofit news outlets looking to cover stories that would otherwise go unreported in our communities.

Jessica Paine, a citizen journalist, is the founder of The Murray Sentinel. She reported the story about tobacco and the largely unchanged practice of curing dark tobacco with smoke. Her story centers around a seventh generation farmer, Terry Orr, 69, of Calloway County.

“We’re a dying breed,” Orr told Paine. “A lot of us that’s growing, our kids are not gonna grow. There’s a few kids that still grow tobacco. You only grew it because your father or grandfather did since you were knee-high.

“Nobody just gets up one day and says, ‘I’m gonna grow tobacco.’ If you had a book that told you all the process of it (and you see) what you gotta do, you’d throw it away.”

Paine’s article is headlined, “Just because there’s smoke, doesn’t mean it’s a fire.” You can read it here.