Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association Warehouse Listed

The Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association Warehouse is significant for its association with a brief but powerful movement to change the tobacco buying process in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina in the 1920s.The Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association was established in 1920 to unite farmers within a single, large organization that would have the power to challenge the prevailing warehouse auction system of sales and undermine the capacity of a handful of large buyers to dominate the terms of sales.

Buoyed by reports of farmers’ cooperatives in other states, supported by a national movement to create state enabling legislation to support agricultural cooperatives, and lauded in many publications including the influential Progressive Farmer, the multi-state, nonprofit organization subscribed thousands offarmer members and controlled dozens of warehouses by buying extant buildings,securing leases, or spurring new construction. The Nashville warehouse in Nashville, North Carolina is one of an unknown number of buildings erected specifically to serve the cooperative movement. As quickly as the cooperative grew, so did it decline, undone by rumors of mismanagement and self-dealing fueled by big tobacco interests and others whose livelihood was threatened by the cooperative. The Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association was assigned to a receiver in 1926 and its assets were liquidated.

The Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association Warehouse in Nashville was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in August 2024 with a nomination by Hanbury Preservation Consulting.