The Tobacco Hatchet
A tobacco hatchet is a light, thin-bladed hatchet used for whole-plant or stalk-harvesting tobacco, where the entire plant is cut at the base and hung to cure with the leaves still attached.
The tobacco hatchet was designed to be inexpensive to produce and for clean slicing, allowing farmers to work quickly without bruising the delicate leaves that determined a crop’s market value.
The thin blade is essentially flat, except for the beveled edge. The rounded disk-like shape on either side holds and supports the thin blade. The round shape provides a smooth transition and does away with any sharp edges that could catch or damage plants.
Collins & Co. out of Connecticut were one of the top producers, and is well known for the version shown above, which is one of the nicest designs. But, many examples of tobacco hatchets (including the hatchets still used today) are much cruder than the one shown above.
They look more like sheet metal bolted to a stick. I don’t have an example, but you can see one here at the Kentucky Historical Society, and in the use picture above.
Use of the Tobacco Hatchet
Historically, there are two ways of harvesting tobacco, and only one uses the Tobacco hatchet.
With priming, the plant is left standing and only the ripest leaves are picked by hand every few days as they mature, starting at the bottom and working upward, which produces more uniform, higher-quality leaf but requires many trips through the field.
With stalk-harvesting, the entire plant is cut at the base once most leaves are ripe and the whole stalk is hung to cure, which is much faster and less labor-intensive but results in a mix of leaf maturities and generally less consistency in color and quality.
In stalk-harvesting, having a large number of inexpensive but effective tools to equip your workers is essential, which is why many tobacco hatchets are so simple.
You could use a knife, a machete, or scyth (and some did) – but even a knife has more high-grade steel and is more expensive to produce than a basic tobacco hatchet.
At harvest time, ripe tobacco plants were cut at the base just above ground level, leaving the entire stalk and leaves intact for curing. The wide, thin blade of the tobacco hatchet allowed workers to sever the thick, fibrous stalks in a single clean stroke, avoiding the tearing or crushing that could damage leaves. This made it possible to move efficiently down long rows of plants while preserving the quality of the crop.
Once a field is harvested, the tobacco is left in place for a few days to cure in the sun. Once the tobacco had sun-cured, further curing took place inside the barn, often during the winter months.
The cured leaves were stripped from the stalks in bundles known as “hands,” and these hands were cut free from the laths and trimmed of their tough mid-stems. In the confined spaces of a curing barn, the tobacco hatchet could shear through bundles cleanly and release hands without shredding or bruising the leaves, making it an indispensable tool throughout the entire tobacco-handling process.
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