The birth of tobacco farming in Weston is usually recognized as 1894. Many people who settled Weston at this time were from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. As they settled the Missouri River Valley, they brought with them the crop they knew best, establishing the only tobacco market west of the Mississippi River throughout the state.
Throughout the next century, the tobacco industry flourished in Weston, averaging five million pounds of tobacco at the local auction houses per year – most of it burley tobacco, used in cigarettes. The federal tobacco program was created in 1938, a national government program that controlled the quantity of American tobacco, attaching quotas to tobacco-producing land and guaranteeing a price for all tobacco farmers if it carried a government grade. The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry once wrote, “Because of ‘the program,’... the tobacco market was the only market on which the farmer was dependably not a victim.”
During those good years, tobacco farming shaped Weston and Platte County and ruled the calendar. In May, fields would begin to fill with baby tobacco transplants, set there by hand by folks riding on a tobacco setter pulled by a horse or mule, and later by simple tractors. On the hottest summer days, as the tobacco reached the shoulders of the help in the fields, it would be cut down by hand with tobacco knives in a sweat-filled process. The tobacco would then be housed in the iconic wooden tobacco barns dotting Weston’s rolling hills. The crop would be handed up from person to person standing on wooden rails, until acres of heavy, dripping wet tobacco leaves filled the ceiling above. The tobacco leaves would then be left to cure for weeks, aided by air circulating through large gaps in the wooden siding of the tobacco barns, turning from green to yellow to brown, bringing the ubiquitous earthy aroma of tobacco to fill one’s nostrils as the days cooled and stripping time grew closer.
In November, the tobacco auctions started and happened four days a week until February. Weston had two auction houses — the Burley House and, opening in the 1970s, The New Deal Warehouse. The warehouses would start to fill up with the tobacco harvest, made up of tied “hands” of tobacco leaves in the early years, and later, with generously stuffed bales that had been stripped and sorted by farmers into different tobacco grades — flyings, brights, reds, etc. Government graders and fedora-topped buyers from companies such as Philip Morris would spend winter months walking the rows of dried leaves, cigarettes lodged in the corner of their mouths, naming prices and buying up pounds and pounds of tobacco.
Throughout the 20th century, the majority of folks in Weston were involved in some part of the tobacco process, no matter their age or gender. The best year on record was 1994, when the Weston market produced 8 million pounds of the crop, bringing in over $14 million to the local economy. But despite the great success of 1994, the beginning of the end of Weston tobacco was just ten years away.
In 2004, the national government ended the federal tobacco program and with it the tobacco auctions, the reasons political, global, health-related and, of course, conspiracy-laden in nature. The tobacco industry shifted from land-based quotas to contracts with individual tobacco farmers. Philip Morris had most of the contracts in Weston during this time, until 2015, when those went away, too. Tobacco in Missouri wasn’t quite dead, but its descent had begun.
Today, there are only eight tobacco farms left in the state of Missouri, and every tobacco plant that finds its way into Missouri soil gets its start inside Lennie Callaway’s Weston greenhouse. Lennie has been in tobacco fields since he was a boy and is now in his 50s. He started as a sharecropper, working in a thriving tobacco market until he bought his own farm at the age of 29. He has seen the peak of the days of farming tobacco, and, is now seeing its final days, his tobacco crop dwindled down to a fraction of its size, and his days now spent at a full-time job outside of his farm. He once raised over 23 acres of tobacco full-time and is now managing two to three, working the fields and stripping the leaves of the stalk on nights and weekends.
Nowadays, it's hard to find enough help for Lennie to raise the amount of tobacco he used to handle. While other crops have benefitted from industrialization and technology, burley tobacco is delicate and still primarily needs to be handled by hand. Lennie has a trusted group of old friends that come out to set the tobacco, cut it from the fields and hang it in his barn with him, the latter a laborious process that happens on some of the hottest days of the year but one that his crew manages to fill with jovial laughter and camaraderie.
In the winter, he spends nights and weekends when he’s not at work in his stripping shed, sorting tobacco leaves that he strips from a stalk and piling them into bales while people stop by to talk to him as he works. These days, the tobacco gets loaded up and taken all the way to Hail & Cotton in Springfield Tennessee — a much further drive than when it went right down the road to one of the many Weston auction houses.
Every tobacco plant that finds its way into Missouri soil starts inside Lennie Callaway’s Weston greenhouse.