Hand-tying tobacco at the Langton Fair

Gerard Demaiter, left, ties tobacco with Mary McElhone and Irene Gubesch at the 2025 Langton Fair. Demaiter, now 94, learned to tie tobacco when he was 14-15 years old. 

Chris Abbott

Editor

Gerard Demaiter, 94, had a lot of tobacco experience under his belt going into the 135th Langton Fair tobacco tying competition.

“We tied by hand,” said Demaiter, who started tying tobacco when he was 14-15 years old.

“Then I got too old to tie and went to the field,” he joked. “Actually, I wasn’t too old, but… by then my sisters were old enough to tie.”

In the late 1940s, it meant priming on foot. He was a tobacco grower when priming machines – carrying seated primers - were later introduced.

And he had no experience with today’s automatic harvesters.

“It certainly is different,” he laughed. “I’ve seen them work, but I never had one. I quit growing tobacco before they came out.

“We had to walk with the horse and sleigh behind it to fill it. They called it the boat. Five primers to do a kiln. That was 1,250 sticks and there were two tyers for the 1,250 sticks.”

In Demaiter’s priming days, horses often pulled the boats back to the kiln. Years later, a ‘boat driver’ drove a tractor or pickup truck taking the freshly-picked tobacco to the kilns.

“It depends how far it was. If it was a long ways off, most farmers had one of those 8N Ford tractors at that time (1947-52). If it was close to the kiln, the horses pulled them in. There wasn’t much waiting between… usually it came from the fields as fast as you could tie it.

“They would pile the sticks up, then they hung them later. There was a big pile there, then the primers, when they got done, they would come out of the field and they hung all the sticks.”

Full-time kiln hangers came with the automatic tying machines and elevators in the 1960s.

Demaiter, who eventually owned a tobacco farm just outside Langton on Hwy 59, stayed in the tobacco business until retiring, and he remembers it being a tight-knit group of farmers.

“They were all in the same business,” he nodded. “I would say 95 per cent of the people who grew tobacco all came from Europe. Mostly Belgium in this area – I know them all. And the Hungarians, and the Polish, and other nationalities too.

“The reason they sort of grouped together is they spoke the same language. None of them spoke English when they came here, including me. I was seven years old in 1939 and I could not speak a word of English, not one word. My family came over (from West Flanders, Belgium) and started straight into tobacco.

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This year at the Langton Fair, Demaiter and teammates Irene Gubesch and Mary McElhone finished third in the hand tying competition, which was won by Mary DeCloet, Agnes MacLeod and Godelieve Townsend in a tight race.

“Hand tying is an art,” Demaiter nodded. “And it was hard on the wrists. Most people, the first few days, they would have a hard time doing it. After a few days, your wrists didn’t bother you anymore. It was just the first day, if you tied the whole day.”