Visit the park to experience our second Focus Weekend featuring tobacco. Production of tobacco was a vital agricultural product and business in Virginia and still is today. The 19th century saw Southside Virginia produce large amounts of tobacco and the park’s Tudor Hall Plantation grew the plant as a cash crop. Programs throughout the day will explore various aspects of tobacco from production to uses by soldiers during the Civil War and  beyond.

12:00 p.m. Tudor Hall Plantation Tour

This tour will guide visitors through Tudor Hall Plantation where they will see a 19th century plantation and learn about the roles of the farmers, enslaved population, merchants and various products made from tobacco.

1:00 p.m. Tobacco and the Breakthrough Battlefield

The forms of tobacco used by soldiers from comfort to trade will be discussed at the park’s recreated Military Encampment and a brief tour of the Breakthrough Battlefield will follow.

3:00 p.m. Tobacco in the Civil War and Beyond

This presentation will explore the different uses of tobacco by Union and Confederate soldiers and the mythology around it’s use by General U.S. Grant. Additionally, participants will  learn about the post-war popularity and the birth of the Havana cigar culture, which persists to the present day.

Focus Weekend Programs are included with paid daily park admission from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. One of “Virginia’s Best Places to Visit” according to the Travel Channel, and designated as a National Historic Landmark, Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier is a 424-acre Civil War campus located in Dinwiddie County, Virginia offering a combination of high-tech museums and hands-on experiences. The Park has four world-class museums and four antebellum homes. The Park is also the site of The Breakthrough Battlefield of April 2, 1865.