Five Brothers Tobacco Empty Packaging

The empty Five Brothers chewing-tobacco packet becomes a religious relic in the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified. Reverend Albert Sykes’s account of reaching it while trapped beneath a collapsed mine turns an everyday object into the emblem of his survival and his founding story for the church.

Origin in Sykes’s Mine Story

In 1924, a mine collapse trapped Sykes in darkness with two other men, who were killed instantly; both of Sykes’s legs were broken. He managed to reach a pack of Five Brothers chewing tobacco in Phil Drury’s pocket, though he could not reach the butter-and-jam sandwich he believed Burl Meadows carried. On the third night, he said, he was touched by the Spirit and believed he would soon join the dead men beside him. Rescuers broke through hours later while he was asleep. For a moment, he mistook their light for the face of the Lord.

The packet’s role in the story is modest but concrete: it is the thing Sykes could reach in the rubble, amid danger and deprivation. The account links that material circumstance to his religious experience without making the packet itself the cause of his survival. Its significance grows through the way Sykes retells what happened.

From Packaging to Relic

Sykes repeated the account from the varnished pulpit, and at its end drew the empty packet from his threadbare suit coat. He held it toward the ceiling in his cupped palms, presenting it to the congregation as the physical remnant of the experience he had just narrated. He carried it everywhere.

Women in Coal Creek, particularly those whose husbands or sons still worked in the mines, treated the packet as a religious relic and kissed it when they had the chance. Its standing in the community was strong enough that Mary Ellen Thompson, on her deathbed, asked for the packet to be brought to her instead of the doctor. These acts show how Sykes’s personal account became shared devotional practice: the packet could be approached and touched, while the story attached to it offered a vivid point of contact with faith and the peril of mine work.

Repetition and Meaning

Willard Russell had heard Sykes tell the story perhaps a hundred times. The packet’s recurring appearance at the sermon’s conclusion gave the account a fixed ritual shape: the preacher narrated his confinement and apparent revelation, then displayed the object associated with that ordeal. For the churchgoers, it was more than an incidental keepsake; for Willard, its repeated presentation was part of a familiar performance in the humble church where he sat during a revival.

The packet’s meaning therefore rests on the contrast between its ordinary material form and the extraordinary history assigned to it. Empty and portable, it passes from the remembered crisis in the mine into the life of the church, where Sykes’s story is retold and the object is venerated. Its power is not independent of that story: it serves as a tangible witness to the account and as a focus for the congregation’s belief.