History
This building, constructed around 1790 to 1799, is the oldest structure in the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. The Sweeney prizery is a building that was a tobacco-packing house owned by Major Joel Flood in 1865. The local farmers would bring their crop of tobacco here to be packed in hogsheads for storage and later transport to the market. Many Confederate soldiers camped in this vicinity during the previous night of the surrender of the Confederate army to the Union army on April 9, 1865. The Sweeney prizery is located near the site of General Lee's headquarters. The Sweeney prizery was built primarily as a residence for Alexander Sweeney and the cellar used as a prizery for his business.
A prizery is a building where tobacco was "prized." Prized means the tobacco is pressed layer by layer into hogshead barrels, large casks or barrels to store and transport tobacco. These casks often weighed up to 1000 pounds. The tobacco plants were first "stemmed" (stripped of fibers) and then packed when the autumn harvest came in.
Tobacco is handled in a leaf stemmery. It is received in baskets from the warehouse and weighed. Then it is roughly graded by basketsfuls and stored in heaps waiting for stemming. The leafs are conditioned for handling. After stemming the "strips" are graded and bundled into "hands." These are straddled over sticks and put through drying and "prized" into hogsheads. The scrap tobacco resulting from handling the leaf was stored in bulk. When it was in sufficient quantity it was then cleaned in a sand reel, dried, and "prized."
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