Just A Little Money For Tabacco

For centuries, the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus earned money for its ministries by renting out land to tobacco farmers and others in Southern Maryland. Then the tobacco industry died, Washington's suburbs swelled, the Jesuit priest population aged and the land became more valuable than the rent. But the Jesuits did not want to sell their large parcels of rural, undeveloped land to just anyone. Then state officials came along and offered to buy and protect it.

Link (here)

Photo of a tobacco field