The Barns That Tobacco Built: Croom’s Most Familiar Landmarks, and Why They Are Disappearing

You have driven past them a thousand times. A tall wooden barn at the edge of a pasture, gray or barn-red or bare, its siding hung in long vertical boards, some of them propped open like shutters. Some lean. Some have lost their roofs. A few have been patched, painted, and put to work again holding hay or horses.

Almost every one of them was built to do a single job: cure tobacco.

For more than 300 years, tobacco was not just a crop in Croom. It was the local economy, the reason for the roads, the way people paid their debts, and the work that filled every season of the year. Then, at the turn of this century, it ended almost all at once. The barns are what is left, and they will not be here forever.