Land of the bright leaf: yellow tobacco, environment, and culture along the border of Virginia and North Carolina

Bright tobacco became the staple crop along the Piedmont border of Virginia and North Carolina around 1840. Although regional farmers had long cultivated tobacco, bright tobacco was a new variety of the old staple, and its culture transformed both land and people. Bright tobacco was a product of established tobacco culture, environmental conditions, and consumer preferences. The new crop brought amazing benefits: it grew best on the poorest Piedmont soils, land unsuited to other crops, and it sold for astonishingly high prices. Bright tobacco also supported a local manufacturing industry that produced chewing tobacco and cigarettes for national and global markets. But bright tobacco eventually impoverished both land and people. The crops culture led to severe soil erosion, deforestation, a dependency on commercial fertilizers, overproduction, and indebtedness. Bright tobacco cultures environmental foundations also shaped regional race relations before and after emancipation. Regional African Americans prospects for landownership and independent labor, and white perceptions of black land stewardship, depended to an extent on white conceptions of crop and environment. Bright tobaccos story was ultimately a tale of the degradation of land, landowners, and labor, but the crops decline had its roots in regional farmers desires for permanence, improved agriculture, and sustainability.