Tobacco is history, tradition, identity, a source of income — and most of all, a way of life — for tobacco growers and for North Carolina. Stretching back to the earliest European settlers, tobacco cultivation paved the way for the establishment of the colonies and was instrumental in the founding of the United States. Tobacco — or more precisely, the profits made from tobacco products — lead directly to the economic growth that created of many of North Carolina’s largest cities and funded the establishment of many of the state’s most cherished institutions. While tobacco remains the most profitable cash crop grown in North Carolina, the precipitous decline in US tobacco production over the last 20 years may foreshadow its eventual disappearance from the landscape.

Something so vitally important to both our history and present time, yet at such high risk of vanishing, deserves to be documented before it is too late. Many historical photographs of tobacco growers and the larger corporate tobacco industry exist, however documentation of tobacco cultivation has declined in tandem with tobacco’s continuous fall in production and rates of use in western society. Pitt County Tobacco is not intended to serve as a glorification of tobacco, but a photojournalistic view of late-stage, post-buyout tobacco farming in eastern North Carolina.