PRINCE FREDERICK -- The Scrivener family has owned its Calvert County farm for nearly 100 years, and every generation has helped grow tobacco, the signature crop of Southern Maryland.

But seven years ago -- before the state started paying farmers to abandon the leaf that might be hazardous to one's health -- the patriarch of the fourth generation, Bob Scrivener, planted something new: rows of Douglas fir and white pine, better known at this time of year as Christmas trees.

Raising trees involves more than trimming them and shooing away deer. It requires patience. Whereas producing tobacco takes 18 months from seed to auction, Scrivener planted his first tree seedlings in 1995 -- and didn't sell one until this year, when he opened his farm to SUVs and saw-wielding customers on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. He and his family put up the "Sold Out" sign after two weeks, having run through the entire mature crop of 150 trees, each of which sold for $30.

When the first cash was in hand, "I thought, 'This is all right,'" he said. "But my God, it took me a long time to get here."

Tobacco farmers throughout Maryland have been giving up on the crop that has been cultivated here since at least Colonial times. The state has paid millions of dollars to farmers who grew tobacco through 1998 and have agreed to stop, giving them $1 for every pound sold that year -- a sum they will receive for 10 years. More than 700 of about 1,000 eligible farmers have participated in the program, said Donald H. Vandrey, a spokesman for the state's Department of Agriculture. Scrivener wasn't eligible for the buyout because he stopped growing tobacco before 1998.

Farmers have chosen to raise all sorts of products in place of tobacco -- flowers, grapes to be turned into wine, fruits and vegetables, livestock, and even horses for residents making their homes on one-time farms. Although the switch to Christmas trees is not widespread, neither is it unique, said Christine L. Bergmark, who oversees the tobacco buyout for the Tri-County Council of Southern Maryland.

"I think it's a matter of finding a crop that works for your lifestyle, that works for your land and is profitable," she said. "There's a sense down there that the demand for Christmas trees is growing."

Scrivener had a hard time quitting tobacco -- growing it, that is, not smoking it, a habit neither he nor his wife, Carol Ann, took up. With farmhands difficult to find as so many people found work in this fast-growing county's construction boom, it was becoming harder to tend the crops. And the sales prices weren't high enough. Like most other area farmers, Bob Scrivener held a full-time job -- he worked for the telephone company, until his retirement after 30 years -- and farmed on the side.

The first time the Scriveners stopped raising tobacco, in 1989, they built a day care center attached to their home, a place to earn extra money and to provide work for their daughters who soon would graduate with education degrees from Salisbury State University. For three years, the fields lay fallow. But Scrivener, now 60, couldn't take it. "I guess it's just in your blood," he says. So he again planted tobacco.

But the same factors that led him to quit the first time resurfaced in 1995. A friend suggested an agricultural alternative: Christmas trees.

So he planted his first crop of trees and has tended them since, adding 500 each year.

This year, trees from the first batch were tall enough to sell. The whole family got involved, with his son helping to cut down trees, his daughters and wife making wreaths, the two eldest of his seven grandchildren donning Santa hats and handing out candy canes. There is a demand for trees that are 8 or more feet tall, he said, so he hopes that the 6-footers in his field will have a growth spurt before Christmas next year.

And they had fun selling this crop, one with a different image than tobacco. "We met so many new and different people this year that were so interesting," said Carol Ann Scrivener, 57.

The Scriveners miss the tobacco each grew up with. Carol Ann Scrivener's family farm is seven miles away. Bob Scrivener was raised in Catonsville after his father went to Baltimore in the 1930s in search of a good-paying job, when the farm could no longer support the whole family. But in 1965, after a stint in the Army, Bob Scrivener moved to the family farm he had visited nearly every weekend and where he had spent his childhood summers. He went to work for the telephone company, married Carol Ann, and started raising tobacco that year.

"Tobacco is our heritage here in Calvert County -- that's what everybody did," Carol Ann Scrivener said. "It's like anything you remember from your childhood: You just hate to see the end of it.

"I know times change and things happen, but it's kind of sad our grandchildren will never know what it's like to be in tobacco fields."

Said her husband: "That was the source of revenue in Colonial times. You paid everyone off in tobacco. It's changed and gotten a bad name for causing cancer. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But we were raised in it -- we're sad to see it go."

They speak longingly of those times, some relatively recent, before the county had a single traffic light, before farms began disappearing and houses started sprouting. Now they pass five lights on their way to town -- including one that links their country road with busy Route 4, 60 miles south of Baltimore.

Selling trees won't make the Scriveners wealthy, but it will keep them -- and, they hope, their children -- in farming.

"I'll get used to it," Bob Scrivener said. "I feel good we have something I think will last for a while. We're hoping to ... pass it on to generations to come."