Hemp, Tobacco, and the Economy That Built Antebellum Lexington

Lexington in the early eighteen hundreds was for a time among the largest and wealthiest towns west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was called the Athens of the West by its boosters, and while that name was self-congratulatory, the prosperity behind it was real. What generated that prosperity was not horses, at least not primarily.

It was fiber and leaf. Hemp was the dominant commercial crop of the Kentucky Bluegrass from the late seventeen hundreds through the Civil War. The plant grows exceptionally well in the mineral-rich limestone soils of the region, and it was in enormous demand for rope, canvas, and bagging, the coarse material used to wrap bales of cotton shipped from the Deep South to textile mills in New England and Britain.

Lexington's factories processed the raw fiber into finished product. At its peak, the hemp economy employed thousands and made Fayette County fortunes. Tobacco layered a second income stream over the hemp economy.

The white Burley variety, first grown in Ohio from Kentucky seed in eighteen sixty-four, would later thrive across central Kentucky and become the base of American blended cigarettes, a market that arrived after the Civil War. Both crops depended, completely and without pretense, on enslaved labor. The processing of hemp was particularly brutal, heavy, rough work that left hands and arms raw.

The wealth of antebellum Lexington, its Transylvania University, its grand Federal-style homes on Gratz Park, its orchestra and theater and literary society, all of it was underwritten by people who worked that labor without wages and without choice.