by Nichole Livengood         portrait by Jen Lepkowski

Back in 1996, Madison County farmers didn’t know what to think when an attractive blonde woman in overalls arrived at their farms to give them advice about crops. But Terri King, the first female tobacco agent with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Services in Madison County, eventually won them over. When she started, she was just 23. “The farmers called me ‘that little girl down at the extension office,’” she chuckles. “They would say to me, ‘I’ve been growing tobacco longer than you’ve been alive.’”

For six and a half years, King drove to farms all over Madison County, giving advice on tobacco-planting methods, plant fertilization and spraying. She diagnosed and cured plant diseases on farms of various shapes and sizes in one of the largest tobacco-producing counties in the state.

In 2003, the year before the federal government started buying out many North Carolina tobacco farms, King left the extension office. But she couldn’t quite leave her years on the farms behind. She enrolled in Western Carolina University’s business program, and for a school project there, she brainstormed a way to preserve the history in all those tobacco barns by making furniture out of the wood. After graduating, though, she moved to Weaverville and started a real estate business, King Associates, and the furniture-making idea sat in a file for five years.

Last fall when her real estate gig slowed down, all signs seemed to point toward pulling that idea back off the shelf. She got in touch with Madison County native Roger Shelton, an expert woodworker who now lives in Greenville, Tennessee. In January, she and Roger officially rolled out New Leaf Historical Woodwork, LLC, a company that creates hand-crafted wooden letter boxes, coffee tables, mirror frames, magazine racks and other functional and sculptural pieces from reclaimed WNC tobacco barns.

The first barn, which New Leaf tore down in January, was donated by Conley Griffin, a tobacco farmer King befriended in her extension-agent days. The Griffin Barn, built in 1890 by Conley’s great-great grandfather, was on Ammons Branch Road near Marshall and had been in his family for four generations. The Griffins once farmed 100 acres, storing tobacco in the barn (until 2001) and using it to house horses and cattle. Conley, now 65, worked as a tobacco grader for the USDA when he and King first met.

They sat down in early spring at the kitchen table in Griffin’s log cabin. Over a Mason jar filled with homemade grape wine, he told tales of a childhood spent farming tobacco. As Griffin told stories, King took them down as fast as she could.

A Buncombe County native, King has lived in the area all her life and describes herself as a “granddaughter of Pisgah.” She loves collecting stories like Griffin’s, and she’s made it part of the New Leaf process. While Roger Shelton and blacksmith Russell O’Dell are busy hammering and sculpting the barn wood into furniture in Greenville, Tennessee, King collects the stories behind the barns from family archives and long neighborly chats on some of the most scenic front porches in these parts. Then she types up the barn’s history and sends it along with every New Leaf piece the company sells. (After she reaches her goal of reclaiming 50 barns, she plans to compile the stories into a book.) So far, she’s torn down one barn and sold around 20 pieces of furniture, and New Leaf is negotiating with area galleries to display some pieces there.

Before the company can get serious about tearing down a barn for furniture, the quality of its wood has to meet certain standards. And, importantly, the barn has to have a story to tell, King says. Not all barns make the cut. Those that do eventually get stamped with the New Leaf logo, a knife and a spear tool used in harvesting tobacco, drawn by Madison County artist Linda Knox.

King seems to be just the right person to connect North Carolina’s past to its present through a creative business idea. And it’s an idea that seems poignant these days, as residents of the top tobacco-producing state in the country are wrestling with their tobacco heritage after lawmakers passed a smoking ban in all North Carolina restaurants and bars in May. The ban goes into effect in January next year. “These barns have dotted the landscape since settlers first came here, but the era is passing,” King says. “We aren’t selling furniture, we’re selling a piece of Appalachian history.”   

To learn more about Terri King’s reclaimed tobacco barns and New Leaf Historical Woodwork, go to newleafwoodwork.com.