The Tobacco Revolution

The spread of tobacco culture to Lee County owed much to the influx of the flue-cure tobacco farmers from other sections of the state. The southern quadrant of the county, recently cleared by logging activity, proved particularly attractive, so that some 200 families from the northwestern Piedmont relocated to the area during the late 1910s and early 1920s. In Downtown Sanford, a regionally important tobacco warehouse complex developed near the intersection of Wicker Street and Horner Boulevard. The first warehouse, known as the Sanford Tobacco Market, was erected in 1915 by farm supply merchants L. P. Wilkins and Buck Ricks. The Sanford Tobacco Market and the warehouses that followed were sprawling frame or brick structures with wide entryways through which farmers drove their tobacco-laden wagons onto the selling floors.

The tobacco revolution in the Lee County countryside set off an unprecedented boom in downtown Sanford. Christmas 1923 proved miraculous for Sanford retailers, as local farm families, flush with tobacco money from a run of good years, rolled into town in newly acquired automobiles and bought everything in sight. Buoyed with enthusiasm, the business community claimed that 1924 would "surpass any year in the history of Sanford in growth and development”.

Sanford continued to be a regional tobacco market over the next half century, a status attributed to the town's "fortunate geographical position at the center of a network of railroads, highways and county roads." In 1947, eight selling floors operated in the town, a redrying plant opened on Wicker Street, and the Sanford Tobacco Company began to construct a complex of storage sheds along the Atlantic Coast Line near the county courthouse." A subsidiary of the Austin Tobacco Company of Greenville, Tennessee, the Sanford Tobacco Company expanded its warehouse complex to eleven buildings with a capacity of 54 million pounds of tobacco by 1959. During peak season, the company payroll swelled to six hundred employees. As recently as 1985, the crop accounted for half of the county's $14.5 million gross farm income.