Around the turn of the 20th century, the Nutbush area – known today as the Drewry community – had just shy of 400 households. And of those households, said local historian Mark Pace, there were only eight that did not derive their income from agriculture.
But in those eight households surely lived people engaged in support services for all those farmers, Pace noted on Thursday’s tri-weekly history segment of TownTalk. There were merchants, bankers, household help and physicians – all the things necessary for a community back in 1900.
Today’s landscape is quite different, to which anyone who drives along most any county road will attest: Subdivisions are popping up where row crops once stood and solar fields are replacing pastures and hayfields all across the state.
But Vance County is a little bit of an anomaly from other counties in the state, Pace said, as he and WIZS’s Bill Harris discussed a condensed history of agriculture in the county. About one-third of the roughly 178,000 acres of land that comprises the county is allotted for agriculture, which includes, pastureland, forestry and crops.
Some counties have virtually no farmland left, Pace said, thanks to urban sprawl and the proliferation of suburbs.
“That’s a trend that will probably continue,” he said.
Vance County – and Old Granville County before it – has a long history with agriculture in general, and as Pace said, “You can’t talk about Vance County and not talk about tobacco.”
From the mid-1700’s, this was always a good place to grow tobacco, he explained.
“Red” tobacco was prevalent then, and used more for plug or chewing tobacco, snuff and cigars.
Fast-forward to the 1890’s when James B. Duke was cornering the market in the cigarette-making industry in Durham, Henderson also was well-known as a tobacco market. According to Pace, Henderson once was the third-largest tobacco market in the world, behind Winston-Salem and Durham.
Henderson was perfectly placed between Richmond and Raleigh, and the railroad meant that the tobacco that was sold and bought each season could hop a freight bound for destinations across the world.
And although tobacco certainly was agriculture’s “king” crop around these parts, there were other agricultural ventures, too, Pace said.
Like silk. And sugarcane.
Huh?
In the 1830’s and ‘40’s, Pace said, parts of Vance County had a fascination with silkworms, who spin their pricey filaments in the branches of mulberry trees. At that time, cotton was selling for between 6 cents and 8 cents a pound, but silk fetched a whopping $4 a pound.
“It was worth your while to mess with silk,” Pace said.
And there was a sugar processing plant in Townsville, Pace said, that processed locally grown sugar cane.
Neither sugar cane nor silk really took hold, but there were other niche producers that had a bigger impact on the local agriculture scene.
Blacknall Strawberry Nursery in Kittrell, for example, shipped thousands upon thousands of plants each year. It was located about where the Dollar General is there along U.S. 1, Pace said. And long-time residents that remember the clothing store Davis’s on Garnett Street may not be aware that Mr. E.G. Davis earlier ventures included a food superette and more in his downtown location before settling on clothing alone.
And he also created the area’s first large-scale ag industry, Pace explained, back in the 1930’s when he established a chicken farm out in the county on what many old-timers still refer to as Chicken Farm Road.
“People are still making a living off the land,” Pace said, but farming and agriculture certainly have evolved over the years as tobacco subsidies and allotments have given way to alternate crops, niche markets and farms became destinations for recreational activities.
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