The West Side

Continuing our tour of the onion barn, this is the west side. The one-story part is the workshop, filled with miscellaneous hardware accumulated over hundreds of years.

It's also where they used to tie up tobacco leaves into bundles wrapped in paper for shipping, after it had hung to dry. The tobacco grown around here is mainly used as the outside wrappers for cigars, I am told. A tobacco barn like the one on our back hillside can easily hold a million dollars worth of leaves, at current prices. It''s an iffy crop though. Lots of things can happen to ruin it, like drought or blight. Seems like quite a gamble, to me. But some of the families who have lived here since before the Revolutionary War still farm tobacco.

The onion barn of course was also used to store onions. There were hundreds of slatted crates stacked inside it when we moved in. Air needs to circulate freely to keep the onions from rotting. We traded the crates to a local florist for annuals, and I had beautiful beds filled with geraniums all around the house for years afterwards. He used them to start his dahlia bulbs in the spring.