tobacco basket questions?

[Jim_Rogers]

A local fellow who travels to KY every so often asked me to cut some red oak strips for tobacco baskets for an old fellow in KY who either makes them or repairs them.
He told me 1/8" thick by 2" wide. And 1/4" thick x 3" wide for the piece around the rim. But he never asked what lengths they wanted.
Do you know what lengths these should be cut at?
Have you ever cut any?
What do you charge for them?
He told me that they like "northern" red oak.
What other types of wood are used?

Thanks
Jim Rogers

[Jim_Rogers]

He just called me to see if I tried making some. Now he says that all the strip are 3" wide and 3/16" thick.
the rim piece is 1/4" x 3". And he wants them 12' long.

Jim Rogers

[WV Sawmiller]

Jim,

   I always heard white oak was the preferred wood for making baskets. I watched an old craftsman making them in Westville, a reconstructed 1850's era town set up between Albany and Plains Ga. The old man was about 80 then. He showed how you split the oak in halves each time till it was thin enough to weave into baskets or chair bottoms. I think hickory may have been used some but WO was best. Never heard of anyone using RO.

[luvmexfood]

Cant add anything about the wood but when young I tied many a hand of burley tobacco and helped place it on the basket. When at the market you would see some tobacco that was tied and placed exactly on the basket and some that was so so. Many  hours of work went into the perfect ones but overall it was the quality of the tobacco that determined price.

[rasman57]

All milling is interesting to some degree, and the request Jim got , even more so.   Most folks would not associate a noisy old mean machine like a sawmill with such an old fashioned handmade item.....neat!

[Wudman]

A tobacco basket is really more of a "tray".  It is about 4 feet square and maybe 6 inches deep.  My Dad still messes with a little bit of dark fired tobacco, but the days of hand tying are long gone.  It is packed loose leaf in cardboard boxes these days.  They normally weigh in the range of 350 pounds.  Everything is sold on contract.  Your price per grade is stated in the contract, so all you have to do is make grade and weight.  Deliver it to the buying station and pick up your check.  The old days of socializing at the tobacco auction are a thing of the past.  A picture is below that I pulled off Google images.

Wudman

[Jim_Rogers]

Thanks for the picture. I did see them when I did some research on them.

I asked him by text, if he wanted red oak or white oak. He said it didn't matter. Well, it may not matter to him but it will matter to his customer.

Jim Rogers

[WH_Conley]

I was thinking they were White Oak. I have seen millions of them. That was a right smart while back. Untold numbers of them were given to warehouse employees to burn Lettuce beds.

The warehouses would hire a 16 year old back then on weekends and Christmas break. When Burley was King in Kentucky Maysville Ky. was the Burley capitol of the world. There were hundreds if not thousands of seasonal jobs to be had. All the hours you could stand to work.

[Don P]

Does the customer normally use sawn stock or is it sliced? I don't know but I suspect sawing it would cause a whole lot of broken pieces, even more so in red oak.
Dad has described to me the ritual of preparing the crop for the auction beginning with tempering the dried leaf beneath the packhouse for a day beforehand so they can handle it without it crumbling, remove it from the sticks and tie their hands to be carefully arranged in the baskets then carefully stacked in the back of the truck. All looking like a florists display, no tears, nothing discolored. How they were going to do that year happened in about 15 seconds as the buyers flipped through their crop, made a mess, bid and moved on. On the way home they either got new shoes, or it was a long quiet ride.