THE DOPE ON HEMP HISTORY

So how do you think East and West Hempfield were named? Cousin to pot plant
proliferated here years ago; some would like to see it growing like a weed
again.

Several hemp stones repose peacefully under walnut trees at the Landis
Valley Museum.

Few visitors ask about the cone-shaped millstones or their ties to hemp,
said curator Bruce Bomberger.

"It's so much forgotten, so much in the past."

Long confused in the public mind with marijuana, its psychoactive cousin,
hemp inhabits a regulatory gray area that has discouraged cultivation. It
hasn't been grown commercially in this country since the late 1950s.

Once, though, hemp was a key ingredient of American and Lancaster County
culture.

Before the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania's hemp-growing epicenter lay
along the Susquehanna River, in Lancaster and York counties.

The original Hempfield Township, which was divided into the present- day
East and West Hempfield townships in the 1800s, was named after Cannabis
sativa, the genus name for both hemp and marijuana.

Dense green plantations of hemp yielded oil, seed and fiber vital to early
American commerce. For more than a century, people lit their lamps and
clothed their families with hemp.

Patriots drafted early versions of the Declaration of Independence on hemp
paper.

Muleskinners shrouded lurching Conestoga wagons and prairie schooners with
hempen canvas.

Sailors propelled the U.S. frigate Constitution "Old Ironsides" with more
than 60 tons of hempen rope and sail.

After 1850, hemp lost ground to cheaper products manufactured from cotton,
jute, sisal and petroleum.

Hemp reinvented itself in the 1930s, thanks to new technology that eased
processing and expanded its use. But, hemp proponents claim, timber and oil
interests crushed competition from plant-based cellulose by demonizing
marijuana and exaggerating its link with hemp.

American hemp got a temporary reprieve during World War II, when enemy
forces in India and the Philippines cut off sources of jute and other
cordage materials.

Today, outgoing Lancaster County Farm Bureau President Mary Jane Balmer
said, local hemp has the potential to bolster farm incomes and provide an
economical and environmentally friendly alternative to petroleum, cotton
and pulp wood.

After all, she said, it's happened before.

"This is something that helped build America."

" According to writer John W. Roulac, hemp also shaped ancient civilizations.

The Chinese used Cannabis to make rope and fishnets as long ago as 4,500
B.C., Roulac writes in his 1997 book "Hemp Horizons, The Comeback of the
World's Most Promising Plant."

Hemp cultivation spread to Japan and Korea and then Europe where, Roulac
notes, Renaissance artists committed their masterpieces to hemp canvas.

An important new hemp venue rose in the 17th and 18th centuries when
Europeans colonized the North American wilderness.

In 1683, said hemp historian Les Stark of Ephrata, the Pennsylvania General
Assembly passed a pro-hemp act that was reinforced by similar measures in
1715, 1726 and 1730.

Raising hemp helped the struggling colonies cut European imports, Stark
noted. "It was part of our drive for self-sufficiency."

Along with flax, the plant became a multi-use staple for colonists, who
spun it into cloth and converted it to cordage and paper on which to print
bibles and maps.

Men often bequeathed hemp to their widows, said Stark, who has written
several books on hemp.

Records at the Lancaster County Historical Society and the courthouse show
that at least 2,500 residents inherited hemp, Stark added. Many more must
have grown and handled it.

The Pennsylvania hemp industry seems to have been concentrated in this
area, Stark said.

"Every township in Lancaster County grew hemp. Between 1720 and 1870, there
were more than 100 mills that processed hemp fiber."

According to an unidentified writer who chronicled the local hemp industry
in a Sept. 2, 1928 Sunday News article, the water-driven mills employed
cone-shaped grinding stones. The stone "runners" were rolled on their sides
across wooden floors to separate the hemp stem from the fibrous bark
without crushing it.

Bidders have ponied up thousands to buy hemp stones at several recent auctions.

But the hemp mills themselves were long gone by 1928, noted the Sunday
News, which surmised that "probably they were a Lancaster County idea,
adapted from Chilean mill grinders."

Hemp farmers sometimes paid the miller for his equipment and did the
rolling themselves, the article reported.

The task was hard, according to Lancaster historian Jack W.W. Loose, who
noted that a machine called a hemp brake was also used to crush the stems.

Loose said part of the local crop went to the rope-walk that once stood
between Grant and East King streets, near Charlotte. Rope-walks were long,
low sheds in which hemp strands were woven into rope.

The 1928 story reported that "Much of the Lancaster County grown hemp was
sent in Conestoga wagons to the rope-walks of Philadelphia of which there
were 10 in 1810."

The tall, thick shocks of hemp resisted processing in more ways than one,
according to 1928 sources.

"There was a belief that there was a devil in the flax stalk (likewise that
of hemp) who had fuzzy hempen hair and the girls feared it to the extent of
having the boys stand by to fight the devil should he appear."

But it wasn't Old Scratch that did hemp in.

Eli Whitney started the decline by inventing the labor-saving cotton gin in
1793. Hemp farmers continued to harvest and process by hand until much later.

The advent of steam and oil powered ships reduced demand for hempen rigging
in the 1800s, when the center of hemp production shifted to the Midwest.

Hemp prospects dipped and soared like a rollercoaster after the turn of the
century.

By the early 1900s, Roulac writes in "Hemp Horizons," the material was used
only for cordage and specialty products like birdseed and varnish.

But during the war, inventor George W. Schlichten developed technology to
separate hemp fibers more efficiently.

That, combined with new technology to fashion paper and plastics from
hemp-derived cellulose, gradually breathed new life into the industry.

Then came the 1937 "Marihuana Tax Act," which outlawed marijuana and
required hemp farmers to obtain a government license.

The resulting red tape, coupled with the drug stigma, drove most growers
and processors out of business, Roulac writes.

Other hemp researchers have tied the fall of hemp to conspiracies by big
business.

Competition from high-cellulose hemp pulp threatened the Hearst Paper
Manufacturing Division and other timber companies with losses in the
"billions," according to Jack Herer's "The Emperor Wears No Clothes."

Hemp fibers also endangered the plastics revolution, according to Herer,
who writes that "Coincidentally, in 1937, (the DuPont corporation) had just
patented processes for making plastics from oil and coal."

Such allegations have never been proven, according to Roulac.

Whatever the cause of its decline, however, hemp was back in official favor
five years later.

As had the Civil War and World War I before it, World War II disrupted
foreign fiber shipments and revived domestic production.

In 1942, according to a "Hemp For Victory" film produced by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, "patriotic farmers" planted 36,000 acres of seed
hemp, an increase of several thousand percent from the previous year.

"Hemp is staging a comeback," proclaimed the narrator as the camera zoomed
in on some of hemp's "countless naval (and military) uses," which included
rope, fire hose and parachute webbing.

The rally lasted only as long as the fighting, though. Closing of the
wartime mills torpedoed cultivation once more. Global hemp production sank
to its lowest level in the early 1990s, according to Roulac, but has since
rebounded outside the United States with the dawn of specialty hemp markets.

Nobody contacted for this story remembered when hemp last grew in East or
West Hempfield Township, or whether "Hemp For Victory" inspired local growers.

But while the plant may be down, it's not plowed under.

Over the next two years, said Landis Valley Museum President Steve Miller,
the museum plans to develop a comprehensive exhibit on the historical uses
of hemp in the county.

The trend toward heritage tourism has Les Stark seeing green.

"If we can start growing hemp again in Lancaster County," he said, "I think
it's one angle that will get tourists in here."