Stories of tobacco workers play big role in preserving Havana history

Growing shade tobacco dominated the Havana, Florida, economy from the Civil War until the 1960s. Depending on who you ask, the memories of what was once a world-famous enterprise in Gadsden County might be diametrically opposed.

On  Saturday, July 10, the Havana History Museum, housed in the old Planters Exchange, will present: “A Half-Century of Amazing Gadsden County History.”

The Havana History & Heritage Society Museum has received a new, $50,000 grant from the Department of State’s Division of Historical Resources to record video interviews with people, both Black and white, who worked in the tobacco industry during its heyday.

This grant will expand the 17 “Voices of Havana” videos that are currently being shown at the museum.

With several of the 15-minute documentaries already recorded, the museum hopes to continue chronicling the stories of people who labored in the fields and tobacco curing barns before the industry’s collapse in the late-1960s.

Tobacco was brought to the Havana area in the 1800s. It had been noted by an early grower that tobacco plants that grew in the shade of a tree produced thinner outer leaves. More supple and with a more delicate taste, they were immediately sought after in the cigar industry.

Quickly, growers responded by building a kind of canopy that filtered the light. First, frames of wooden slatting, then cheese-cloth, later plastic mesh were used. Almost immediately, the “shaded” tobacco was a hit with buyers. And Havana’s future prospects took off.

Donna Warlick, who worked in the tobacco barns as a child of 7, and now sits on the Board of the Museum and acts as Grants Director, recalls that children of both races were let out early during the school year to help with the farms’ labor.

Despite the growing area’s relatively small 40 square miles and 6,000 acres, there were upwards of 2,000 tobacco barns where the thin, fine leaves of “shade tobacco,” that would become the outer wrappers of cigars, would be stored. And it seemed everyone was involved. That is the positive part.

Havana’s tobacco was designated “the World’s best” at the 1902 World’s Fair in Paris, and its delicacy and taste led to thousands of jobs. Of course, that was from one side of the equation.

Enslaved persons had been the first to be used for raising the tobacco that had been introduced from Virginia. After the Civil War, the growers often kept the Black workers in a kind of indentured servitude, never able to pay off their debts and leave the farms.

Yet many of the elderly African American interviewees do speak of the “community” spirit of Havana at the time, a time when little children worked alongside teens, and teens aspired to jobs of greater responsibility inside the barns.

“Primers,” “luggers,” “table waiters,” “stringers,” “stick boys,” were some of the descriptive job titles.  Working in the sun, the primers would cut and stack; the child luggers would run the leaves to “barges” — wagons pulled by mules; the table waiters, off-loaded the leaves to stringers who threaded the leaves onto string attached to a stick.

The stick boys delivered bundled leaves to men high in the rafters of the curing barns who hung the tobacco where it would be allowed to dry for four to eight weeks.

Despite a feeling of camaraderie, there were, of course, many negative aspects to the hot, hard work. One person remembered being paid $1.25 a week. Others recalled a practice of using toxic “arsenic of lead” mixed with cornmeal to place in tobacco buds by hand. The workers made do, they have said. But Havana was growing.