Tennessee Heritage

Dorothy Williams Havens Founder

Dorothy's story begins on a century farm in Middle Tennessee tobacco country. She loved the early morning when the dew's on the grass, and in the fall there's the hint of tobacco smoke from the harvest in the air.

Traditionally this was dark-fired tobacco country -- the smoke that you see rising from tobacco barns is from dark-fired tobacco. In the 1930s or 40s, Dorothy's father was instrumental in bringing the burley tobacco business to the area, adding to their traditional dark-fired crop. She started working on the farm at age eight, a gift that instilled a love for the outdoors. By twelve, she helped with planting, hopping onto a two-seat setter to work all day setting young tobacco plants in the ground. Once the tobacco was cured, she would find her way into the stripping room, where they would strip leaves off tobacco stalks. Cured leaves were baled and were taken to auction by her father, where Dorothy spent many days on the loose-leaf floor listening to the auctions.

The tobacco barns around the farm were more than just structures -- they were part of who they were. Each had its own character and story to tell. Each fall as harvested tobacco would be hung in the barns and smoldering fires started, the familiar scent of dark-fired tobacco smoke filled the air, the same scent that always clung to her father when he came home. Even today, when its late September or early October, when she smells curing tobacco smoke in the air, it transports her to her youth and memories of the farm and her father.

Family life centered around the farmhouse table in the kitchen and her mother's three daily meals – breakfast came with the sunrise, and dinner was always at six o'clock. It was the place where farm business was planned and discussed, homework completed, gossip shared, fabric cut for making clothes, pie dough rolled for pies, and the location of countless holiday meals with extended family and friends.

Memories of summer days spent with her mom and aunts under the creek bridge, waiting for rainbow trout to be stocked, then fishing through summer and fall. Racing around the farm on her Honda CT-70 dirt bike, claiming to be "checking" on workers while occasionally running into hay bales. And though she disliked hunting, she cherishes memories of dove hunting with her father, wearing a hunting jacket with shoulder pads to cushion the shotgun's kick.

Heritage is at first intangible. However, the outcome of families across generations can be seen in the little things. It lives in the memory of the tobacco smell in the October air, that same smell that Dorothy's father would carry into the house on his clothes, in barn posts worn smooth by working hands, in dawn's dew before a day's harvest, in families gathering at farmhouse tables. Instilled from one generation to the next are the values of hard work, honesty, resiliency.

Dorothy's remembrances and experiences put a voice to her heritage... that which was started a long time ago, passed down, and now renewed as Buffalo River products pre seasoned for a new generation of families to use as their own.