Tobacco Road

English

Etymology

There were and are many roads of this name in the American South. The meanings are derived from the 1932 novel, Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell and the 1933 play and 1941 movie derived from it. Caldwell does not use the term "Tobacco Road" to refer to the region or place, only to the roads themselves.

According to Caldwell, the roads were created by rolling thousands of tobacco casks over them, over many decades. In the Savannah Valley of 1932 there were "scores" of these roads, ranging up to 30 miles in length. The casks were known as hogsheads, were roughly 48 inches by 36 inches and weighed about 1000 pounds once filled with leaves.

Pronunciation

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Proper noun

Tobacco Road

1. A dirt road, created by the passage of thousands of tobacco casks being rolled, mainly by people or mules, from plantations to river steamboats or trucks.
2. A region of North Carolina historically associated with the production of tobacco.
3. (sports, slang) The four North Carolina schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
4. A fictional place in the rural American South inhabited by poor and uneducated people who live in dilapidated structures.
   • 2004, Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, page 169:

     If you have traveled in the remote parts of the Deep South, I am sure you have seen the architecture of Tobacco Road - shacks built of whatever materials were available at the time, often by a series of owners. Maybe the roof is corrugated tin, but one wall is made from a billboard and the doorstep is a cinder block.

   • 2004, Mike Echols, I Know My First Name Is Steven, page 124:

     All in all, the scene was one of an ethereal Tobacco Road West.

   • 2000, Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, Edward Bruce Tucker, Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, page 151:

     Then we got Tobacco Road on the corner here, but they finally got burnt out. The family she referred to lived at the end of the block.

   • 2006, Lee Server, Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing, page 43:

     The next time he saw her it was her picture in the newspaper, with the story all about the Tobacco Road girl who had made good.

   • 2007, Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte, page 83:

     But those Tobacco Road stereotypes of the South and rural America are the same disparagements that the Republicans hurled at the Populists a century ago […] .

Derived terms

• tobacco-roader
• tobacco-roadish