Throwback Thursday: When tobacco ruled the town

For almost a century, one of the largest and most recognizable buildings in Downtown Bowling Green stood as a symbol of the industry that helped build southcentral Kentucky: tobacco. The J.E. Bohannon tobacco warehouse along College St. opened around 1930, a local business specializing in the processing of leaf tobacco. Back then, Bowling Green wasn’t just a growing city, it was a regional tobacco hub.

Farmers from Warren County and surrounding communities hauled burley tobacco into town by wagon and truck to be graded, sold, stored, and shipped. Warehouses like Bohannon’s became the center of local agriculture and commerce during a time when tobacco was one of Kentucky’s most valuable cash crops.

And Downtown Bowling Green looked very different then. The L&N railroad tracks nearby helped move tobacco across America and around the world. The smell of curing tobacco often drifted through the city streets, mixing with the sounds of freight trains and warehouse workers moving giant bundles of leaf tobacco inside these massive brick buildings.

If you stepped into the Bohannon warehouse during tobacco season, you’d likely see towering piles of tobacco leaves hanging from wooden beams, buyers carefully inspecting crops, and farmers anxiously waiting to see what kind of prices their hard work would bring. For generations, tobacco money helped support local farms, businesses, schools, and families throughout Warren County.

At one point, Bowling Green was filled with tobacco-related businesses, but today, the Bohannon building is one of the few remaining structures from that era, a physical reminder of the city’s agricultural and industrial roots. By 1978, the Bohannon company had closed its doors as tobacco markets evolved and agriculture modernized. Years later, the building found new life as a storage facility for Ironwood Furniture. Then in 1988, disaster struck when part of the warehouse suffered severe damage during a fire. Even so, the old structure survived.

In May of 2023, the warehouse and several nearby properties were acquired by current owners, Beech Holdings, LLC, another chapter in the long story of a building that has watched Bowling Green transform for nearly a century. And while the warehouse itself is now considered to be in too poor of condition to fully restore or bring back up to modern code standards, the spirit of the building will survive. The developers worked to preserve and repurpose as many materials from the warehouse as possible, including wood, bricks, windows, and industrial pieces that helped keep the facility operating for nearly 100 years.

Instead of simply disappearing, pieces of the Bohannon warehouse will continue telling stories in southern Kentucky through new spaces and future developments. It’s a reminder that preservation doesn’t always mean saving every wall exactly as it stood; sometimes it means carrying the history forward in a new way.

Today, Downtown Bowling Green is known for restaurants, entertainment, festivals, and small businesses. But long before Fountain Row, Duncan Hines Days, or Concerts in the Park, buildings like the Bohannon warehouse helped make this place an economic engine for rural Kentucky.

It stands as a reminder that Downtown wasn’t only built with neon lights and storefronts. It was built with railroads, warehouses, agriculture, and generations of hardworking people who shaped this community one tobacco season at a time.

This reporter grew up on a Warren County farm where tobacco was king for decades. We stopped planting when I was a young child, but I remember the smell of tobacco in the barn and riding on the back of the planter thru the field next to our home. The ghosts of what’s left of these places tell stories of our rural agricultural roots.