When I was a boy, we had a couple of these. I don’t know anyone who grew tobacco around here, but this is a tobacco planter. The device was shoved down into the ground and worked well if the ground was freshly plowed. It consisted of two hollowed chambers. The smaller chamber was a chute that you dropped the plant through, and it was hollow all the way down. The larger chamber was a reservoir for water. It had a rod that went through it down to a stopper in the bottom. It would hold about 2 gallons of water, so it had some weight to it when full. At the top, there was a handle and a small grip-activated mechanism that opened the hinged cone at the bottom and lifted the rod with the stopper. So, it opened up the hole, depositing the plant into the dirt, and allowed water to pass through. You lifted the planter and moved on to the next planting.
As I said, we didn’t plant any tobacco, but the tobacco planter could be used for any small, bare-rooted plant. We only used it for tomato plants when I was growing up, which I believe we got in bundles of 25 from Central Feed and Seed in McDonough. My daddy remembers using them for pepper plants, and I have also seen them used for collards. Was this a great time-saving device? No, not for us it wasn’t, but maybe you could get proficient enough with it for it to be worthwhile. It did allow you to transplant small plants while standing. For us, I think it provided a benefit because it was interesting enough to make us want to help with the garden. I guess we weren’t much different than the fence painting boys in The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.
Here’s a quick video I made showing the tobacco planter and an example of its use:
https://youtu.be/IdAMcTGx2qs
And here is a little more info, with another video:
https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/13898#?#details&c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&xywh=-1%2C-331%2C1940%2C1940