fore it is
ripe, or ready for cutting, the ground is perfectly covered with
leaves, which have increased to a prodigious size, and then the
plants are generally about three feet high. When it is ripe, a
clammy moisture or exudation comes forth upon the leaves, which
appear, as it were, ready to become spotted, and they are then of a
great weight and substance. The tobacco is cut when the sun is
powerful, but not in the morning and evening. The plant, if large,
is split down the middle, and cut off two or three inches below the
extremity of the split; it is then turned directly bottom upwards,
for the sun to kill it more speedily, to enable the laborers to
carry it out of the field, else the leaves would break off in
transporting it to the scaffold. The plants are cut only as they
become ripe, for a field never ripens altogether. There is generally
a second cutting likewise, for the stalk vegetates and shoots forth
again, and in good land, with favorable seasons, there is a third
cutting also procured, notwithstanding acts of the Legislature to
prevent cutting tobacco even a second time.

When the tobacco plants are cut and brought to the scaffolds, which
are generally erected all around the tobacco houses, they are placed
with the split across a small oak stick, an inch and better in
diameter and four feet and a half long, so close as each plant just
to touch the other without bruising or pressing. These sticks are
then placed on the scaffolds, with the tobacco thus suspended in the
middle, to dry or cure, and are called tobacco sticks. As the plants
advance in curing, the sticks are removed from the scaffolds out of
doors into the tobacco house, on to other scaffolds erected therein
in successive regular gradations from the bottom to the top of the
roof, being placed higher as the tobacco approaches to a perfect
cure, until the house is all filled and the tobacco quite cured, and
this cure is frequently promoted by making fires on the floor below.
When the tobacco house is quite full, and there is still more
tobacco to bring in, all that is within the house is struck, and
taken down, and carefully placed in bulks, or regular rows, one upon
another, and the whole covered with trash tobacco, or straw, to
preserve it in a proper condition, that is moist, which prevents its
wasting