Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 2, 1993 TAG: 9304020054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SOUTH HILL LENGTH: Long
WHERE TOBACCO IS KING, MUSEUM NO PIPE DREAM
"What do you know about tobacco?" Dorothy Thomas asks sweetly as she bustles through the office of the South Hill Chamber of Commerce.A few things come to mind: Low birth-weight babies. Emphysema. Lung cancer.
That's not what the chamber's executive director means. "I'll teach you a little," Thomas says.
Last fall, she and a group of South Hill residents spent a week walking 56 miles north to Petersburg to teach people about the heritage of tobacco. Then they hosted the second annual Tobacco Farmers' Barbecue.
Now Thomas and other town leaders are shedding every remaining scrap of political correctness to work on their most ambitious project yet: Virginia's only Tobacco Museum.
And Thomas doesn't even smoke.
"We do some crazy things around here," she says. "But tobacco is the bread of our community. . . . We know if the tobacco farmers have a good year or a bad year by the amount of business activity that goes on in our town. It's that vital."
Put it this way: Don't expect to find a no-smoking section in every South Hill restaurant. At least one folksy eatery equips every booth, table and spot at the counter with an ashtray.
"Just don't put that in your paper, or else they'll be out here after 'em," says Paul H. Jeffreys, a third-generation tobacco farmer and warehouseman who is helping Thomas start the museum.
Tobacco could have no stauncher defender than Jeffreys, 67. When asked if he smokes, Jeffreys glowers like he's been pinched, then barks, "Yes, SIR!"
All of the talk these days about tobacco's causing cancer doesn't ring true to him. "These people get in these damn laboratories and go crazy as hell, that's my opinion," he says.
"We call a spade a spade here," Thomas says with a nervous smile.
Jeffreys is unapologetic. "If you look at it, they're not saying tobacco causes any of these diseases. They're saying it comes from smoke. And if you go down the road behind one of these tractor-trailers, or if you approach one of these manufacturing cities, you have to ask yourself, how much cigarettes would it take to produce that much smoke?"
When Jeffreys' wife had surgery in Richmond recently, she asked the doctor if she could smoke in her private hospital room.
"The doctor said, `Well, see, I'll tell you like this: I want you to pay your bill, and since your husband is in the tobacco business, I'm going to give you permission to smoke,' " Jeffreys says with a laugh. "So a lot of these doctors [who preach against smoking] are just going along with things. . . . If I felt that my smoking would cause another person's death, I wouldn't smoke another one."
As it is, Jeffreys smokes most every American brand of cigarette (because all the makers buy at his warehouse), sometimes enjoys a pipe or a cigar and occasionally even chews tobacco ("but you better give me a lot of room to spit when I chew," he says).
His Exchange Warehouse is one of four places in South Hill where tobacco farmers go to auction the golden weed. Last year, farmers pulled in $16 million from sales at all the warehouses, Jeffreys says.
Of the 4,500 people who live in South Hill, about one in six is a farmer, and virtually all of them plant tobacco. It is Virginia's leading cash crop; one in every 19 jobs in the state is linked to tobacco production, according to Joe Walton of the Mecklenburg County Cooperative Extension Service office.
South Hill and Mecklenburg together form the state's third richest tobacco market, behind the counties of Pittsylvania and Halifax, Walton says.
South Hill owes much of its existence to tobacco - or 'BACK-ah, as the locals pronounce it - and, in a sense, so does Virginia. Tobacco served as money in Jamestown and helped make the original colony profitable.
That is what the Tobacco Museum is all about: "Preserving our heritage," Thomas says.
The museum will be in a triangle-shaped brick warehouse that was built in 1915. Thomas is collecting old advertisements, bills of sale, tools, paraphernalia - anything the local farmers can get their hands on that relates to tobacco. Someone has even donated an old tobacco barn that Thomas hopes to set up across the street from the museum, along with a few actual rows of crops.
Museum organizers have raised $10,000 and done basic renovations to the old building. Thomas can't say how soon the museum will open; she is waiting to hear from a few corporate donors like Philip Morris Inc. to kick things into high gear.
She hopes not to hear from anti-smoking activists, who so far have been quiet. What it would take to create a militant anti-smoker in South Hill is hard to say; local bank President James H. Wells quit smoking to honor the wishes of his tobacco-farmer father, who died of lung cancer.
Now Wells is one of the leading backers of the museum.
So if you go to South Hill to learn about tobacco, the lesson you might get is this: "I think all of us would be in a helluva fix," says extension agent Walton, "if it wasn't for tobacco."