Broad Hoe Blade
Virginian
Iron alloy
This is a weeding hoe, designed for clearing weeds and chopping through roots. This heavier style of hoe would have been used frequently throughout the growing season.
Tobacco farming was a labor-intensive process that required nearly year-round attention. Seeds were planted in warm beds of mounded earth early in the year and seedlings were transplanted to the fields by early spring. Tobacco plants needed constant attention in the form of pruning and pest maintenance until the fall when the leaves were stripped and cured in airy barns. Packed into barrels called hogsheads and shipped in early spring, the finished tobacco product was sold just as a new crop was moving into the fields. Overreliance on tobacco throughout fluctuating prices and seasons of poor crop performance lead to enormous debts among the planter class; debts that some enslavers, like those at Wilton, chose to pay at the expense of the lives of those they enslaved.