Nearly 60 years ago, one late summer or early autumn day, my father drove alone from Hopkinsville to Princeton for a meeting. We were newcomers to Western Kentucky — and like many who take their first drive through the countryside in this end of the state, my father noticed a barn on fire. Or so he thought.
He pulled off Princeton Road and drove to a farmhouse to tell someone about their trouble.
To hear him tell the story back then, he had stopped at three or four farms before someone told him that none of those barns were actually burning. They held dark-fired tobacco that was being cured by the smoke of smoldering hardwood, usually oak or hickory planks, beneath sawdust spread across the barn’s dirt floor.
This was all new to my father, who grew up in West Virginia and East Tennessee. We came to Hopkinsville from Memphis in 1966.
I thought of that old memory and my family’s introduction to Western Kentucky farm traditions when I read a story this week in The Murray Sentinel about a tobacco farmer.