I never even thought about all that was involved in the curing. It's an art of science. A lot of ventilation, temperature, and humidity control. So the leaves were dried to a certain color/dryness and then water/humidity was added to put a small amount of moisture back in the leaf to make it pliable.
I guess the modern way would be to use a humidifier. Did ya'll use fans in the curing process or open/close doors dampers? Wet bulb/dry bulb thermometer? I guess it would be similar to a meat smoker in some ways but a lot more complicated. Some HVAC type implications of ventilation, temperature, and humidity.
So eventually this tobacco reaches the warehouse and the buyers inspect it. I would think they have did this long enough to know what to look for. The right color, touch, smell? This being what they price the sheet. Making sure the leaves don't have spots or rot?
I do remember how much lighter a stick of cured tobacco was compared to a green wet stick.
Yeah, the tobacco had to be "in case" as we called it here, or the leaves would disintegrate when you went to work with them. The burley that we grew is a much different process than y'all's flue-cured, I guess.
We cut the whole stalk and used a spud (sharp metal cone) to impale the stalk on the stick that you drove up in the ground in the field. Depending on the size of the plants, you'd get about 5-7 stalks of 'backer on a stick. You would leave the sticks standing in the field a couple days, then haul it to the barn and hang the sticks between the tierpoles and let it air-cure.
When it was ready to work up, we would usually get woke up at some point in the middle of the night when it was "in case." (There is usually fog almost every night in the fall here in the mountains, and it would dampen it down enough to work, but it would usually be after midnight.)
Then you would take the stalks off the sticks, and pull all the leaves off the stalks and tie them into "hands" with another 'backer leaf. These would be packed into a pair of big, flat tobacco baskets to take to market.
The leaves usually had to be separated out into several grades-I remember sand lugs, lugs, smokers, reds, and tips.
In later years, we only separated it into two or three grades, and baled the leaves by compressing them into big bales with a reinforced plywood box and a bumper jack.