Tobacco Road

Meaning

Proper Noun

• 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.
• A region of North Carolina historically associated with the production of tobacco.
• The four North Carolina schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
• A fictional place in the rural American South inhabited by poor and uneducated people who live in dilapidated structures.

Origin

• 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.