Gadsden County, Florida

The crop that organized the county

In 1896, someone in Gadsden County discovered that tobacco grown under cloth shade produced cigar wrappers worth ten times the price of sun-cured leaf. By the early 1900s, miles of white cheesecloth stretched on wooden poles covered the fields around Quincy and Havana. At the Paris World's Fair in 1900, Gadsden County shade tobacco was rated the finest in the world.

The structures required labor on a scale that organized the entire county around them. Black farmworkers — many of them children — spent summers under the cloth, harvesting in heat that topped 100 degrees. The town of Havana was named for its association with Cuban cigar tobacco. By the mid-1960s, more than 6,000 acres were under shade, over 2,200 barns operating.

Then it ended. Changes to labor laws shifted production to Central America. Cigar consumption declined. The last crop was harvested in 1977. Byron Spires, editor of the Havana Herald, put the aftermath in one sentence. "We're still experiencing the repercussions of that. We've never put that many people back to work."

The wealth that stayed, and who it stayed for

Here's what makes Gadsden County different from the other distressed counties I've written. In most of them, the wealth left. Tobacco, coal, timber, cotton — the industry collapsed and the money went with it. In Gadsden, the wealth stayed. It just wasn't visible to everyone.

In 1919, Pat Munroe, a Quincy banker, watched people spend their last nickels on Coca-Cola and began urging his white depositors to buy Coke stock at $40 a share. He underwrote bank loans backed by the shares. By mid-century, Quincy had 67 Coca-Cola millionaires — more Coke stock per capita than anywhere in the country.

More than half the county is Black. Gadsden is the only majority-Black county in Florida. The Coke millionaires were white. A single share from 1919 is worth an estimated $10 million today with reinvested dividends. The median household income in Gadsden County is $51,288.

Thelma Todd Conner, who manages the Shade Tobacco Museum in Havana, grew up in the fields. "I grew up here, and I grew up poor," she told Tallahassee Magazine. "But I didn't know I was poor."

Crisis scores in a working county

The CDI score is 84.5. Crisis zone. Twenty-third most distressed county in America, out of 3,144. First in Florida.

The primary driver is Consumer Credit Distress at 94.4. Forty-one percent of residents carry debt in collections. Median amount: $3,048. Credit card delinquency at 10.7%. Medical debt at 13.1%. Student loan delinquency at 24.7% — nearly one in four borrowers behind, in a county where the median income reaches 77% of Florida's statewide median.

The bankruptcy data tells a different story from what I've seen in other Crisis counties. In Pemiscot County, Missouri — one of the most distressed counties in America — 89% of bankruptcies are Chapter 7 liquidations. Nothing left to reorganize. In Gadsden, 37% of 92 filings are Chapter 13. Chapter 13 is the bankruptcy where you keep your house.

The homeownership rate here is 72.9%. People own homes. They are filing bankruptcy to hold onto them — using the court the way Florida's unlimited homestead exemption was designed to work. The debt is real. So is the fight to keep the house.

Thirty miles from the capital

Tallahassee is thirty miles east. Leon County scores 68.2 on the CDI. Serious. Rank 477 of 3,144. Gadsden County. Crisis. Rank 23.

The proximity is the mechanism, not the solution. Gadsden exports its workers to the capital and imports its poverty back. Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, opened in 1876, is the county's largest employer. Gadsden Correctional Facility, a private women's prison run by the Management and Training Corporation, is the second. Capacity: 1,544. The two anchors of the local economy are a mental hospital and a prison — institutions the state placed here because they needed to be somewhere.

The uninsured rate is 16.4%, 91st percentile. State Rep. Alan Williams described the consequence. "If someone has a cardiac arrest and has to be transported to Tallahassee, there's a strong chance they won't survive." One in five residents has a disability. A quarter are on SNAP. Most neighboring counties scores Serious or worse. Calhoun, Jackson, Liberty in Florida, Decatur and Seminole across the Georgia line. Grady County, Georgia scores Crisis at 80.4. Leon County sits in the middle of this belt, buffered by something more durable than distance.

What Dean Mitchell painted

Dean Mitchell grew up in Quincy painting the tobacco barns he worked in as a child. His grandmother Marie Brooks bought him a paint-by-numbers set from the local five-and-dime. He went on to become a nationally recognized painter. The barns he painted were, in his own description, "structurally magnificent" — and inseparable from the poverty of the people who worked inside them. Beauty and exploitation in the same structure. The Marie Brooks Gallery in downtown Quincy is named for his grandmother.

I don't fully understand the business formation number. At 17.6 applications per thousand residents, Gadsden County sits at the 8th percentile for distress — meaning 92% of counties look worse on this metric. Seven hundred seventy-one new business applications in 2024, up 48% since 2019. For a Crisis county, that's anomalous. It could be Tallahassee spillover — entrepreneurs filing in the cheaper jurisdiction next door. Or it could be something genuine taking root. In January 2024, Florida A&M University partnered with the Gadsden County Development Council on a $500,000 federal workforce grant targeting agriculture, technology, and manufacturing.

The population peaked at 46,389 in 2010 and dropped to 43,826 by 2020. New retail — ALDI, hardware stores — is arriving in Quincy and Midway. Whether that's the beginning of something or a final echo is the question that hangs over every data point in this county.

What grows here next

Gadsden County scores 84.5. Crisis. Twenty-third in the nation, first in Florida. The indicators to watch are rent-to-income ratio and student loan delinquency — both above the 93rd percentile, both measuring whether the generation that stayed can afford to keep staying. The shade cloth came down half a century ago. What grows here next depends on who it grows for.