As tobacco fades
As a North Carolina native and descendant of William Winston, who came into port at Jamestown, Va., in the late 1600s, I am a representative of a tobacco farming family that goes back nearly to the beginning of Britain’s tobacco trade in the “New World.”
If John Rolfe hadn’t gotten some seeds from the Caribbean of what we tobacco farmers lovingly call “The Golden Leaf” and planted them in Virginia, America as we know her would not even be here.
Now, I am allergic to tobacco smoke and will be quite comfortable in places without having to breathe it, but I would be remiss, as would North Carolina and the rest of America, if we did not recognize the positive effects tobacco has had on our economy. Tobacco has built, and in the case of the South after the Civil War, rebuilt America. Our roads, our schools (if you look at the decline of tobacco, you could possibly find a correlation with our inability to keep up with school populations) and all the transplants working out in the RTP have tobacco to thank.
We must find something else with which to compete globally if we expect to build our country back up again with everyone eagerly lining up to hammer nails into the coffin of tobacco.
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