"'And everything’s been sold American,

The lonely night is mourning for the death it never dies

Everyone’s been sold American

Don’t let me catch you laughing when the jukebox cries.'
I don’t know what inspired country singer/songwriter Kinky Freedman to come up with that chorus and title on “Sold American,” his 1973 ode to a “faded jaded falling cowboy star,” but I always assumed it was spawned by an iconic Lucky Strike commercial.

I remember it from my youth, when cigarettes still were advertised on television, when a tobacco auctioneer’s essentially indecipherable chant as he passed along piles of leaf for sale ended with a ringing “Sold to American!”

For more than a century, well into the 1980s, chants much like that rang out each fall in downtown Durham. The tobacco auction was how farmers throughout the tobacco-growing regions of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and other states sold their crop each year to American Tobacco, Liggett and Myers and other cigarette manufacturers.

It was a key link in the socioeconomic life of the region. The scores of farmers — not to mention auctioneers, warehousemen, federal tobacco graders and others that surged into downtowns of market centers throughout the region — impacted the city’s and the region’s economy.

“The auction season created its own economy and culture,” Cynthia de Miranda, a historic preservation consultant, wrote in a 2008 nomination of Durham’s Liberty Warehouse for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.

“Farmers camped in the buildings’ basements until their tobacco sold and then cashed their checks at branch banks, ate in cafes, and shopped at stores all housed in warehouse buildings,” she wrote. “Shops scheduled sales for the auction season to appeal to farmers while they were in town.”

The last tobacco auctions were held in Durham in the mid-1980s. With the passing of time and the swelling of the area with new residents, a dwindling number of us remember what that auction culture and season was like.

But as de Miranda’s writing reminds us, it was very much a part of the fabric of life.

I grew up in a small tobacco-market town, Mount Airy, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, and in my first newspaper job at the hometown weekly called each Thursday to get the week’s pricing averages for Friday’s edition. Those prices were important to the farmers, and the merchants along Main Street whose sales ebbed and flowed with the success of each year’s crop.

Liberty Warehouse, named to the National Register as a result of de Miranda’s writing and later also accorded local Historic Landmark status, has been much in the news and on the minds of many lately since a portion of its roof collapsed in May.

Greenfire Development, Liberty’s owners, has submitted detailed plans to the city for repair and stabilization of the warehouse, and has reaffirmed its eventual plans, when the economy improves and tenants and financing are more plentiful, to rehabilitate the structure, safeguarding its historic integrity while transforming it into a modern mixed-use development.

I hope they succeed. But it’s important that the community realize the irreplaceable link to that century of auctioneering that helped to define this city."

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The Herald Sun (9/4/2011)