A fictional place in the rural American South inhabited by poor and uneducated people who live in dilapidated structures.( sports, slang ) The four North Carolina schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.A region of North Carolina historically associated with the production of tobacco.A dirt road, created by the passage of thousands of tobacco casks being rolled, mainly by people or mules, from plantations to river steamboats or trucks.The casks were known as hogsheads, were roughly 48 inches by 36 inches and weighed about 1000 pounds once filled with leaves. In the Savannah Valley of 1932 there were 'scores' of these roads, ranging up to 30 miles in length. Caldwell does not use the term 'Tobacco Road' to refer to the region or place, only to the roads themselves.Īccording to Caldwell, the roads were created by rolling thousands of tobacco casks over them, over many decades. The meanings are derived from the 1932 novel, Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell and the 1933 play and 1941 movie derived from it. But by the early-20th-century setting of this novel, the tobacco market has long since gone bust, and the cotton market seems likely to follow. The humorous touches during the worst moments only provide the kind of light relief that casts a dark shadow. The tobacco road that passes by the rural Georgia home of Jeeter Lester and his family, in Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road, may speak to the prosperous colonial history of tobacco farming. There were and are many roads of this name in the American South. Tobacco Road is the story of the Lesters, a family of sharecroppers living through a kind of end-stage poverty in 1930s America.

Tobacco road novel