Etymology

Proper noun

1. A fictional place in the rural American South inhabited by poor and uneducated.
2. Dilapidated housing as might be found in the rural American South.
   • 2004, Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, page 169

     If you have traveled in the remote parts of the Deep South, I am sure you have seen the architecture of Tobacco Road - shacks built of whatever materials were available at the time, often by a series of owners. Maybe the roof is corrugated tin, but one wall is made from a billboard and the doorstep is a cinder block.

   • 2004, Mike Echols, I Know My First Name Is Steven, page 124

     All in all, the scene was one of an ethereal Tobacco Road West.

3. Poor and uneducated rural Southerners
   • 2000, Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, Edward Bruce Tucker, Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, page 151

     Then we got Tobacco Road on the corner here, but they finally got burnt out. The family she referred to lived at the end of the block.

   • 2006, Lee Server, Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing, page 43

     The next time he saw her it was her picture in the newspaper, with the story all about the Tobacco Road girl who had made good.

   • 2007, Geoffrey Nunberg, 'Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte , page 83

     But those Tobacco Road stereotypes of the South and rural America are the same disparagements that the Republicans hurled at the Populists a century ago [...].