Every time Charleston architect Steve Coe rides through Timmonsville on the way to visit family, he wonders whether an old, leaning tobacco barn has fallen down since his last trip.
“It’s as if the earth is slowly taking it back,” he wrote Friday on SouthernCrescent.org. “It represents a time long passed, but also it reminds me how everything is ‘of the earth.’”
Across the Carolinas, old tobacco barns are disappearing at an amazing pace. Once a dominant structure in rural areas, as many as nine barns out of 10 are gone compared to the number in place during the peak of tobacco production a few decades ago.
In South Carolina, Coastal Carolina historian Wink Prince estimates the state had as many as 25,000 tobacco barns, mostly in the Pee Dee, in the 1950s when tobacco production peaked on about 100,000 acres. Today? There might be only a few hundred tobacco barns left — and no more than 2,000, Prince guessed.
In North Carolina, the number of barns was about ten times more — 250,000 — when Tar Heel farmers grew up to 700,000 acres of tobacco a year in the 1930s, estimated state historical preservation officer Michael Southern. He figured there were no more than 10,000 left across the state today.
“That sounds like a lot, but they’re disappearing every day,” he said. “It’s a sad loss of a cultural icon. If I got upset every time one disappeared, I would have jumped off a bridge a long time ago.”
So, what should we do — let them keep falling down or try to figure out how protect barns so our children will be able to view pastoral scenes that show visual evidence of our heritage and a way of life that fueled the Pee Dee for years?
“I would hope that a certain number of them could be preserved so that we would have some sort of tangible record, a visual record of a time,” said Eric Emerson, director of the S.C. Department of Archives and History. “The economic engine for that area for a long time was the culture of tobacco. It’s a broad period that was just as long-lasting as the textile industry and you see vestiges of that.”
The state, he said, has created incentives for preserving and restoring old textile mills, which often end up as apartment lofts, businesses and more. Why not work on an incentive for preserving old tobacco barns, cotton houses, silos, historic barns and other structures around the state?
That’s a good idea, said state Commissioner of Agriculture Hugh Weathers.
“In the Pee Dee, a tobacco barn is next to a church steeple in terms of importance in the rural community,” he said.
So here’s an idea for state legislators — an idea that shouldn’t be too controversial and might be something Democrats, country club Republicans and tea party Republicans can rally around: Let’s create an income tax incentive for landowners who spend money to preserve old farm structures that can be seen from a county road or highway.
To qualify for a tax credit of 25 percent of the money they use to stabilize or preserve an old farm building, they’d have to get it put on the National Register of Historic Places, which means the building would have to be at least 50 years old. The preserved building should not be used for significant commercial purposes, because farm buildings in use may qualify for existing tax breaks. And you could put a cap on the maximum amount of the incentive every year to keep the budgetary impact low so the state didn’t lose too much revenue. For example, if owners spent $10,000 each to preserve 100 buildings, the impact to the state budget would be $250,000 a year.
Think of this proposal as a way to incentivize farmers and landowners to create rural heritage sites to preserve agricultural vistas of the state.
Weathers said preserving old tobacco barns and other buildings possibly could keep some rural property values higher because of their ties to the past.
So, who’s going to be first in line to write a bill to help preserve our rural agricultural vistas?
 
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.

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