If you’ve ever been to a live auction, you likely can recall the auctioneer’s singsong selling as he or she announces the current bid and asks for other bidders to bid more.
But did you know that tobacco auctioneers do the reverse? Yep, they start out with a high price and then that number goes down until the lot is sold.
The days of seasonal tobacco auctions in big warehouses filled with bundles of golden, aromatic leaf have given way to direct contracts with the big tobacco companies, but folks will get the chance to see a “real” tobacco auction later this month at the Oxford Tobacco Research Station.
Last year’s event brought hundreds out to see – and hear – a veteran auctioneer practice his craft.
The “Granville Gold: Mock Tobacco Auction & Farm Heritage Celebration” will be held on Sunday, Sept. 27 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., according to Frank Timberlake, who is helping to promote the event, which is sponsored by the Granville County Historial Society and Museum.
“If you go back and look at what founded many of the rural counties, it was tobacco,” Timberlake said on Thursday’s segment of TownTalk.
The upcoming mock auction will showcase the spectacle that was the tobacco auction, when groups of men – buyers alongside the farmers who’d tended the crop – would follow the auctioneer up and down the rows of tobacco, piled in bundles on those familiar shallow woven wood baskets.
“That’s when everything happened, good bad or indifferent,” Timberlake said, recalling the auctioneer as he worked. “He’s walking – not even hardly taking a breath,” he added, “selling 500 piles of tobacco in an hour.”
Auctions are scheduled to take place at the top of each hour – 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.
In addition, there will be plenty of exhibits on the grounds of the tobacco research station, located at 300 Providence Rd., near the intersection with Providence Road and the Oxford Loop near the N.C. Cooperative Extension offices.
There will be all kinds of vendors, too, and food for purchase.
Admission is free, and folks will have an opportunity to participate in a real auction of two antique tractors – a fundraiser for the historical society. That auction begins at 3:30 p.m.
Remember, though, that unlike tobacco, bids for the tractors will go up, not down.
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