Today, tobacco is known to be a dangerous product, and its use around the country has been on the decline for many years. Yet tobacco has been a crop associated with North Carolina since Sir Walter Raleigh took tobacco to England (from Virginia) in 1586. Starting around 1880, tobacco farming, and especially the manufacture of cigarettes, contributed a lot to the prosperity of North Carolina. Today North Carolina leads the nation in tobacco production.
Tobacco is a plant native to the Western Hemisphere. Its broad leaves are cured (heated or otherwise dried) and crushed into tobacco used for cigars, cigarettes, snuff, and pipe tobacco. Nicotine from the tobacco affects the brain, sometimes providing a short-term pleasant feeling or “kick.” Nicotine, however, is highly addictive, so that people have difficulty stopping smoking. Even more important, the smoke transmits harmful products to the lungs, often leading to cancer.[1]
Experts think that indigenous people in Central America began smoking tobacco during religious rituals thousands of years ago. The habit traveled through the Americas, so Native Americans were smoking it (with pipes) when Europeans arrived in Virginia. In 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh, founder of the “Lost Colony” on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, took tobacco to England. He was not the first person to introduce it to England, but his name is linked to it because he did so much to make it popular. Smoking became associated with him and the other elite courtiers surrounding the monarch) in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Smoking seemed to illustrate their “spirit of adventure.”[2]
As early as the mid-1600s, Virginia had become the center of production and sale of tobacco—especially since Virginia and nearby Maryland had good ports for shipping the product to Europe. But demand grew so much that tobacco farming “spilled over” into surrounding areas, including northern North Carolina (which the Virginians at the time called “Rogues Harbor”). Tobacco was so steady in value that it became used as money, especially to pay debts.
In 1663, King Charles II granted the colony of North Carolina to the “Lord Proprietors,” associates of the king who had helped him return to power in England. As part of the grant, Charles banned the cultivation of tobacco in the colony. This was to please officials in Virginia and Maryland, who wanted to keep control of the tobacco market. But that did not last long. North Carolinians grew tobacco throughout the 1600s and 1700s—and later.
In the middle of the 1800s, a big change in North Carolina’s tobacco production occurred. A new way to cure tobacco was discovered. It made “bright leaf tobacco,” which is yellower and milder than “dark tobacco,” the prevailing product at the time.
The Story of Bright Leaf Tobacco
There is a widely believed story about how bright leaf curing was discovered. In 1839, Stephen, an 18-year-old enslaved young man in Caswell County (whose last name we don’t know), worked as a blacksmith for the Slade family. At times he would watch over the fires used to heat and dry the tobacco. One night, according to the story, Stephen fell asleep. Awaking suddenly, he found the fires were almost out. He ran to the blacksmith’s shop where he picked up piles of charcoal. He dumped them onto the fires, not only reviving the fires but for several hours raising their temperatures far above the usual level. The result? A yellow, milder, and overall better tobacco, which became known as bright leaf.
This story surfaced in 1886, nearly 50 years after it supposedly took place, in an article in the Pittsylvania (Virginia) Tribune. It was repeated in a popular magazine, the Progressive Farmer. And it was included in a well-respected 1949 book about bright leaf tobacco written by Nannie May Tilley.
Until recently the story was generally accepted by historians. Now, however, some historians seriously doubt the charming “lucky accident” story, partly because it appeared so many years after the event was said to have happened.[3] It is true that Stephen’s enslaver, Abisha Slade, and his brothers became known for their work in developing bright leaf, however.
In any case, bright leaf tobacco was subsequently grown widely in North Carolina’s Piedmont region (the middle third of the state). In 1864, another type of tobacco, burley tobacco, appeared. It is air-cured (rather than dried by heat) and is grown in western North Carolina, although its main source is Kentucky.
Washington Duke, Entrepreneur
Washington Duke was a farmer in the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the mid-1800s. He produced staple crops like wheat and corn, but it is not known whether he grew tobacco. After he served in the Civil War (he was drafted, and reluctantly fought for the Confederacy), he decided to start a business curing tobacco.
So Washington Duke created flue-curing “factories” (in this case, small buildings) on his farm. After his tobacco business outgrew his homestead, he moved it to Durham (about five miles away), where his son was also curing tobacco. Durham had become a big center for selling tobacco, and in 1881 Mr. Duke decided to sell cigarettes, which had become a popular way of smoking.
Making cigarettes was a slow process. A person could roll just four cigarettes per minute. But in 1880, a young Virginia man, James Bonsack, had figured out a way of rolling cigarettes by machine. Duke decided to try it. Once it was running well, the Bonsack machine could produce 200 cigarettes per minute!
Mr. Duke was clearly an entrepreneur, willing to venture into something untried. So was his son, James B. Duke, who developed advertising for his cigarettes. His competitors were astounded at the amount of advertising he was willing to buy.
Cheaper production and extensive advertising led to enormous success—not just for the Dukes but for other cigarette manufacturers as well. And as the tobacco business flourished, so did towns in the Piedmont and eastern North Carolina. “The tobacco factories literally and figuratively towered over the cityscapes of Durham and Winston, North Carolina,” writes Roger Biles, reporting on the impact of the tobacco growth. Other towns, such as Wilson and Kinston, also grew as a result of the tobacco business.[4]
The Duke family subsequently invested in the business of producing electricity—another sign of its willingness to risk money in an entirely new venture. The family also gave substantial funds to Trinity College in Durham, which became today’s Duke University.
The tobacco story continues in Part II.