English

Proper noun

Tobacco Road

1. A fictional place in the rural American South inhabited by poor and uneducated people who live in dilapidated structures.
   • 2004, Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, page 169:

     If you have traveled in the remote parts of the Deep South, I am sure you have seen the architecture of Tobacco Road - shacks built of whatever materials were available at the time, often by a series of owners. Maybe the roof is corrugated tin, but one wall is made from a billboard and the doorstep is a cinder block.

   • 2004, Mike Echols, I Know My First Name Is Steven, page 124:

     All in all, the scene was one of an ethereal Tobacco Road West.

   • 2000, Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, Edward Bruce Tucker, Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, page 151:

     Then we got Tobacco Road on the corner here, but they finally got burnt out. The family she referred to lived at the end of the block.

   • 2006, Lee Server, Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing, page 43:

     The next time he saw her it was her picture in the newspaper, with the story all about the Tobacco Road girl who had made good.

   • 2007, Geoffrey Nunberg, 'Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte , page 83:

     But those Tobacco Road stereotypes of the South and rural America are the same disparagements that the Republicans hurled at the Populists a century ago [...].