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 Historic Tobacco Barn Found in Bent Mountain Woods
Antique barn to home conversions are becoming a new trend, featured in magazines that cover real estate from Country Living to Architectural Digest. Giving these magnificent old barns and cabins a second life satisfies homeowners interested in preservation. Additionally, recycling and re-using brings out numerous creative ways to positively impact the environment.
Although life on Bent Mountain hasn’t changed that much in the last 75 years, newcomers wanting a peaceful lifestyle now co-exist with old-timers whose families have lived in these mountains for generations. Long before the modern homesteaders discovered Bent Mountain, VA (Roanoke County), Morgan Bartlett’s granddaddy, T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Bartlett, farmed tobacco back on what locals call “the second loop”. Morgan remembers working with his grandfather and father raising and curing tobacco, taking it down the mountain into Shawsville by horse and wagon, and then shipping their product to Lynchburg by train. According to Morgan, his granddaddy raised mostly chewing tobacco, not the “pretty golden tobacco” farmed in warmer Franklin County.
Morgan’s grandfather got one crop a year, picking the tobacco in late summer and curing it in the Chestnut Tobacco barn in the early fall. Although Morgan (75) remembers dead chestnut trees still standing majestically in the forest, not much remains of those tall trees today. Chestnut stumps still sprout new growth but the trees never mature to adulthood. The Chestnut Blight of the early 1900’s took out an entire species of trees in a little over a decade. Economically important to the people of the southern Appalachians, the American Chestnut was lightweight, soft, easy to split, very resistant to decay and the straight grained wood was ideal for building log cabins and furniture.
T. J. Bartlett built his tobacco barn around 1918 from dying chestnut trees cut right on his property. Fireplaces on the outside of the barn fed flues two feet in diameter that went into the building, down the back wall and out the opposite side. The circulated air caused the heat to rise and dry the tobacco which hung on sticks throughout the interior of the barn, which functioned like a huge oven. The fire had to be tended constantly for two or three days, and Morgan remembers the interior of the barn becoming so hot that his dad wondered how the barn kept from catching fire.
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