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Pipe smoking in women (or men) was very common among rural women of ALL races. It is not an “Indian” attribute. White rural women and black rural women historically smoked pipes also. As for Chester Co., PA, there are still a number of Indians there – living. Like most large cities, Philly (and the greater Delaware Valley area) has several Indian organizations to which many people living in Chester Co. belong.
My Mother speaks of rolling corn silk and smoking it. also the grape vine leaves.
Of course back behind the barn. She swears that smoking the grape leaves gave her typhoid fever.
My GGgrandmother smoked a corncob pipe, as told by my grandpa.
In fact, as she went blind with age, he was given a scolding for
putting her dress out when her upside down pipe let go its coal.
On a side note…..
I was honored to go to several cerimoneys with the Potowatomy Pokagon band (nishnabee?) years ago, and it is a practice among them for cirtain chosen women to become “Pipe bearers”, which is a respected and honorable position not limmited to the male gender. I cant and wont claim to know more than what little I do other than that, but I know anyone who wants to find out about their customs are allways welcome among them. Good people.
In fact, I will salute in my own way, one I had the pleasure to know
and gift with tobbacco as she shared her wisdome and passed her
pipe around before she passed on. Boshue Minnogeeshee quey.
I miss you.
Ed and All,
I have a catalpa tree on my “back 40”. Next year if anyone wants, I can send you some of the pods if you want to try smoking them. If you’re trying them on your own, make sure you get the pods and not the catalpa worms, as they would probably be hard to keep lit and stink as they burn. I’m not sure about any Surgeon General’s warnings though. Caveat Emptor!
Jim
All,
Also, my (and Aubrey G. Cole’s) gr. aunt Becky (Cole) Goins chewed “backer” and smoked a pipe occasionally. They say when she died and they had her “laid out” at the ole homeplace, you could smell the scent of tobacco around her coffin. Now whether that was her ghost or some other reason, I cannot say.
Jim
when she died and they had her “laid out” at the ole homeplace, you could smell the scent of tobacco around her coffin
Just a guess, but tobacco was used as a moth repellent in blanket chests and similar storage pieces. Maybe she was laid out in relatively fine, seldom worn clothes, that had been stored that way? Cedar chests and moth crystals have a similar effect — the cloth is preserved, but at the cost of a strong and lasting odor.
Pappy,Jim and all, we can remember much about the use of tobacco. The use of a pipe by women was used in particular to mountain women. They were always pictured wearing half men’s clothes such as hats, coats, and shoes and smoking a corn cob pipe. This was really a mockery of the “country hicks” who were personified by the Yokum’s and such like. As said before the use of tobacco smoking a pipe was really not that unusual if truth be known.
Chewed tobacco either from cigarett or other sources was applied to bee stings to draw the poison and stop the pain. The tobacco trash swept from the packhouse was dusted over the turnip salad patch to cut down on insects eating the leaves. The accumulation of this trash and dust in the tobacco warehouses became a volatile product that could be ignited into a raging inferno. When you were working in green tobacco and pulling it to put in the barns and cured the early dews and tobacco juice literally soaked into you and some people got sick in the first weeks of harvest. A general antidote was to take a bite of chewing tobacco and chew it in those first weeks of harvest and men swore it stayed off the green tobacco poison. Ed
My Mom told me my G Grandmother smoked a corn cob pipe. Her Mother(My GG Grandmother) was supposed to have been Blackfoot. Thanks, Jefff in STL
I met relatives this fall who remember seeing one of the grandmothers in Deb’s line smoking a pipe as they walked to school. She sat on her porch smoking as they passed. She was not the only one. My McLane also was known to have smoked a pipe. All were from PA but lived in IA. And Blackfoot is the story in both these sides of the family.
Techteach
Ed,
Being a smoker myself, to this day I use tobacco on bee/wasp stings. It’s amazing how quickly it pulls the poison out and stops the pain. I just put a small wad of tobacco in the palm of my hand, spit on it, mush it up, and hold it on the sting (or use a bandaid if I have one handy), and in five to ten minutes, the pain is gone. Pretty amazing stuff!
Jim
Pappy,
Good point. My grandmother’s the one that told the story about smelling Aunt Backy’s tobacco and it had always puzzled me. And I remember the smell of moth balls well. It’s one of those smells that you never forget once you’ve smelled it. Thanks for the possible explanation!
Jim
The CLay pipes, does anyone have a pic they can send to my email? ugh i have questions lol. I think Aunti Linda prolly knows why lol wow i again have been gone from here for way to long geeeeesh.
As a small boy in the 50’s I used to twist tobacco for my ggrandmother Sarah Wampler Sizemore. She would hang it in the kitchen over the stove to cure and then cut small pieces with a pocket knife and place it in the pipe to smoke. I am attaching a picture of two pipes belonging to Sarah and her mother Mary Ann. Mary Ann was born around 1840 and Sarah in 1877.
My grandmother chewed and carried around a coffee can spitoon. She could spit and hit that can from a good distance too. I’d often, as a child, be sent to the store for a pack of Redman or Workhorse (I believe it was called Workhorse) when I was a kid, back before kids were not allowed to purchase tobacco products.
I asked my mom, who smoked up until a couple years ago following a heart attack, about it one time and she said it was not uncommon for the women down where my grandmother was from to smoke (cigarette or pipe) and/or chew tobacco. To my knowledge my grandparents never raised tobacco, but my paternal grandparents did, yet never chewed or smoked it. They had a good sized, well it looked good sized to my toddler eyes at the time, crop of it behind their house along with it being dried in a small shed along their driveway.
But I do not believe it was just a Native thing. I saw way too many other women in the hills with pipes, cigarettes, and chaw to put it to just Native people’s useage.
My great-uncle told me many years ago that around the turn of the last century his grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) would send him to the store to buy tobacco which she smoked in a clay pipe. This was in the Missouri Ozarks, but the woman in question was the daughter of a former judge and a large landowner, and married to a prominent attorney: she was a mountain granny of the old school, but not a stereotype.
Michael Dunn
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