their own curing "recipes." Each leaf loses approximately eighty percent of its own weight by the time the curing process has successfully finished. In the first two weeks of the curing process, about an acre of hanging tobacco loses about five tons of water. The vents are used to slow the drying process down which allows for a critical chemical break down to occur, turning the leaf from green to yellow to brown. To maintain ideal curing temperatures over the course of the curing process, farmers not only rely on the vents but on heat. While charcoal fires have been replaced in many barns with propane heaters, both methods help reduce moisture. With all of the variables that can impact the curing process, it is no wonder that the unique design of the tobacco barn has remained constant as a time-tested method for drying tobacco. The interior framing would be set up in bents up ten feet, but more often about four feet apart horizontally, so that laths (also called "tobacco sticks") with tobacco attached to them could be hung for drying. The tier poles were often supported by posts and cross beams, the space in between known as the "bents." The bents ranged in vertical spacing from 20 inches to five feet wide. The bent itself became an important earmarker in determining crop volume. Farmers would commonly refer to barn size in terms of bents and the rule of thumb was one bent will hang half an acre of tobacco. In some areas, bents were called "rooms," even though this just defined a narrow and tall division of the inside of the barn by the tier poles. In North Carolina, for instance, bents were called rooms, and a typical barn for curing flue cured tobacco was four rooms in size. Current state U.S. states, such as Maryland, have sponsored programs which discourage the cultivation of tobacco. In 2001 Maryland's state-sponsored program offered cash payments as buyouts to tobacco farmers. A majority of the farmers took the buyout, and hundreds of historic tobacco barns were rendered instantly obsolete. As tobacco barns disappear, farmers have been forced to change their methods for curing the crop. In Kentucky, instead of curing tobacco attached to laths in vented tobacco barns as they once did, farmers are increasingly curing tobacco on "scaffolds" in the fields. The 1805 Tracy's Landing Tobacco House No. 2 located