Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands

by Charles Nordhoff

CHAPTER XI.

TOBACCO CULTURE—WITH A NEW METHOD OF CURING THE LEAF.

The manufacture of cigars is one of the largest industries of San Francisco. Last year the Government received taxes on 78,000,000 cigars made in the State of California, and in September alone taxes were paid on 8,000,000. But, though the State has thousands of acres of land well fitted to produce tobacco, and though the "weed" has been grown here for twenty years or more with great success, so far as getting a heavy crop is concerned, I doubt if even 1,000,000 of cigars have, until this fall, been made of tobacco raised in California.

There has, however, been no lack of efforts to produce here tobacco fit to manufacture into cigars and for smoking and chewing purposes. The soil in many parts of the State is peculiarly adapted to this plant; the climate, mild and regular, favored its growth and hastened its perfection. The best seed was procured from Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and Cuba. But for many years the product was rank, coarse, and fitter for sheep-wash than for any other purpose.

Meantime, however, not a few men familiar with the old processes of raising and curing the plant have tried their best ingenuity to improve the quality. It was thought that the soil was too rich, because the tobacco makes a rapid and heavy growth; but planting on thinner or older soil did not answer. Several methods of curing were contrived, and there is now reason to believe that the one known as the Culp process, from the name of its patentee, will produce the desired result. I had heard and read so much about it, and about the merit of the tobacco produced by it, that I went down to Gilroy, seventy or eighty miles south of San Francisco, to see what had really been accomplished. The account I give below will probably interest many tobacco growing and manufacturing readers, while it will, I fear, painfully affect the spirits of the anti-tobacconists; for there is reason to believe that tobacco will become presently one of the most important and valuable crops of this State.

I must premise that I am not an expert in tobacco, nor familiar with the methods pursued in the East. I have seen a tobacco-field and the inside of a Connecticut curing-house, and that is about all. I give, therefore, not opinions, but facts.

Gilroy stands in a long and broad plain, a very rich piece of alluvial bottom, with water so abundant that artesian wells are easily bored and very common. At the depth of one hundred and thirty feet they get flowing wells, and it happened in one case of which I heard that the water came up with such force as to prevent the casing going down into the well, and the pressure of the water broke away the ground, enlarged the bore of the well, and threatened to flood a considerable area, so that the farmers gathered in force, and by means of an iron caisson loaded with stones, and with many cart-loads of stones besides, plugged up the dangerous hole.

The land is a deep alluvial loam, easily worked, and here, and in some neighboring valleys, many tobacco growers have been engaged for the last ten or twelve years. Mr. Culp, who was a tobacco grower, and, if I understood him rightly, also a manufacturer in New York for some years before he came here, and who appears, at any rate, to be a very thorough farmer and a lover of clean fields, has planted tobacco here for fifteen years. He has a farm of about seven hundred acres, four hundred of which have this year been in tobacco. From him and others I learned the following particulars of the way in which they cultivate the plant in California.

They sow the seed from the 1st to the 10th of January, and sometimes even in December. The beds are prepared and sown as in the East, except that they do not always burn the ground over, which, if I remember rightly, is invariably done in Missouri and Kentucky. In this season, the days are always warm enough for the little plants; but there are light frosts at night, and they are protected against these by frames covered with thin cotton cloth.

The fields are plowed—by the best growers—ten inches deep; cross-plowed and harrowed until the soil is fine, and then ridged—that is to say, two furrows are thrown together. This saves the plants from harm by a heavy rain, and also makes the ground warmer, and is found to start the plants more quickly.