King Tobacco Deposed

Soybeans, and not tobacco, were Virginia's #1 cash crop in 2004. Neither the linked Times-Dispatch article nor the site of the Virginia Agricultural Statistics service contains historical information, but I would imagine that there are no more than a handful of the last four hundred years in which tobacco has not been #1 in the Commonwealth. Here is a pretty decent one page history of tobacco growing in Virginia.

Thanks to Waldo Jaquith, whose link led me to this story.