John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life

[238] Rebel Wilcox, who had a splendid farm on the left bank of the river, had hundreds of bushels of corn, I should judge, which the forage trains took aboard before they crossed over; and on the south side of the James, east from Petersburg, where Northern troops had never before pene-

A corn-barn and hay-rick.

trated, many such stores of corn were appropriated to feed the thousands of loyal quadrupeds belonging to Uncle Sam.

In this section, too, and in the territory stretching from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, immense quantities of tobacco were found in the various stages of curing. The drying-houses were full of it. These houses were rude structures, having water-tight roofs, but with walls built of small logs placed two or three inches apart, to admit a free circulation of air. On poles running across the interior hung the stalks of tobacco, root upwards. Then, in other buildings were hogsheads pressed full of the “weed,” in another stage of the curing. It is well known that Petersburg is the centre of a very extensive tobacco-trade, and in that city are large tobacco-factories. But the war put a summary end to this business for the time, by closing northern markets and blockading southern ports, so that this article of foreign and domestic commerce accumulated in the hands of the producers to the very great extent found by the army when it appeared in that vicinity. Every soldier