Dipping snuff together was a method women used to create bonds of fellowship and
camaraderie among themselves.
After dinner when the men might go off together for after-dinner drinks and
smoking pipes or cigars, the women would congregate in another room for a time
of dipping and visiting.
Most gents had a hard time getting used to seeing women dipping snuff. Their dreams of the ideal young woman to marry definitely did not include a
woman who dipped and spit. This dilemma was somewhat resolved in later years
when snuff dipping abated somewhat and cigarette smoking came into vogue for
both men and women. That seemed to be more acceptable to men than seeing women
dipping and spitting.
l
Cypress Top, located at 26026 Old Hempstead Highway, is one of Commissioner Steve Radack’s Harris County Precinct 3 Parks. Museum buildings are open every Tuesday from 9
a.m.-4 p.m. for drop-in visitors. Cypress Historical Society docents conduct
tours at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. To schedule a group tour for a different day
and time, please call this Precinct 3 office number:
281-357-5324. E-mail Jane Ledbetter at janel_54@att.net if you have questions about this article or Cypress genealogy and history.
When the first immigrants came to this continent, many of them were already
familiar with tobacco. They soon found good places in America to grow tobacco,
and more and more men began using it. It was not too long before women also
began indulging in tobacco use in one form or another. In fact, both President
Andrew Jackson
’s wife and President Zachary Taylor’s wife smoked pipes. The pipes used by both men and women were often made
locally from wood, clay, stone, bone, metal or corncobs. Generally speaking,
the corncob was thought of as
“the true American pipe.” Men liked cigars quite well, too, but cigars were not too popular with women.
By the late 1830s anti-tobacco sentiment was growing among Northern women; not
so in the South. Indeed, Southern women began to seriously indulge in
“dipping snuff.” The simplest way to dip was to get a pinch of snuff between the thumb and
forefinger and place it in the mouth between the lower lip and gum. However,
the mode preferred by many ladies was to find a small, straight twig from a
tree or shrub, with bark, and chew one end until it became soft and pliant,
forming a brush. The brush was dampened with saliva and then dipped into the
snuff container (containers were usually bottles or boxes). When particles of
snuff stuck to the brush, the lady put the brush in her mouth, mopped her gums
and teeth with it and soon began sucking on the tobacco juices, spitting often
to get rid of the saliva that would build up.
