08/23/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1HXSvu3wov/?mibextid=wwXIfr
For a stretch of the twentieth century, the sandy fields of northeastern North Carolina grew the peanut that the rest of the country considered the good one. 🥜
The Virginia type peanut is big, and it grows best in exactly the kind of light sandy loam you find in Bertie, Hertford, Northampton and Gates counties. Farmers dug the vines with a plow, shook the dirt loose by hand, and stacked them around wooden poles in the field to cure, so that by late October the whole landscape looked like it was covered in small brown haystacks.
Then came the shelling plants and buying stations in Windsor, Ahoskie and Severn, where the whole town's fall income walked through the door in burlap sacks. Peanut money paid property taxes, bought school clothes and settled accounts at the general store. Mechanical harvesters eventually ended the stacking, the federal quota system ended in 2002, and acreage shifted, but the crop never left. 🌾
There are people who can still smell a peanut field being dug in October and tell you exactly what month it is without checking.
