State

The Tobaeco Industry II was in its infancy in llic years |нчччч1ш|> llio Civil War. Then саше» a pcrioil of great expansion, anil loilay — well, practically everybody knows how the industry lias grown. WHEN the Captains of the expeditions sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh to "spy out" the new land, obtained from the native Indians “uppowoc" or "tobacco." and when Sir Walter introduced the use of the weed among the English nobility, he little dreamed the extent to which the industry so established would grow. Its use has spread to the far corners of the earth, to every people and to every clime, and even the Eskimos within the frozen arctic wastes can produce both a Camel and a match when and as required. I only wish Sir Walter could see the vast plants of the Reynolds Company at Winston, or those of Liggett and Myers at Durham, or those of the American Tobacco Company in Durham and Reidsville. Local Manufacture Prior to the Civil War the small manufacture of tobacco was largely confined to the barns of the producing farmer, who raised the crop in the summer, prepared it for market In the fall and peddled it through the country in the win¬ ter. The pioneer manufacturer in the correct sense of that term was James R. Green of Durham, who marketed his "Best Flavored Span¬ ish Smoking Tobacco" at that place. Both Confederate and Fed¬ eral armies passed through Dur¬ ham just prior to the surrender of the army of Johnston to the Federal General Sherman, and both armies levied toll upon the product of the pioneer Green. If the last named army robbed Green of both his goods and his capital, they none-the-less gave wide adver¬ tisement to his product, and soon orders began to pour into Durham from all over the country for the "Best Flavored" brand. Green was forced to seek ad¬ ditional capital and this need was supplied at first by W. T. Black- well who thenceforth became a figure to be reckoned with in the growing industry. With this firm General Julian S. Carr thereafter tty К. C. LAWRENCE became associated, a name long associated not only with Durham but with North Carolina. For $4,000 he bought a one-third inter¬ est in the Blackwell Company from such small beginnings did the industry come! The Blackwell firm conceived the happy idea of adopting, as a trade mark, a Dur¬ ham bull, and under the trade¬ mark "Bull Durham," the brand became famous throughout the world and made the city famous along with it. Coining of the Dukes Immediately following the Civil War. Washington Duke and his sons, Brodie L.. Benjamin N.. and James B., went into the business, at first peddling a product pre¬ pared in their own burn and la¬ belled “Pro Bono Publico." This proving |Mipular, the business was moved to Durham where in 1873 the firm of W. Duke Sons and Company began the manufacture of the brand of smoking tobacco THE COVER PICTURE Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey chats with Ensign Lindsay Warren. Jr., son of the Comptroller Gen¬ eral of the United States, aboard a Coast Guard-manned transport carrying the former world’s heavyweight boxing champion to European waters. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Wash¬ ington. I). C.. Ensign Warren was a freshman at the Uni¬ versity of North Carolina be¬ fore accepting a commission in the Coast Guard Reserve. His home is Washington, North Carolina. The Hon. Lindsay Warren resides at 3300 Stuyvesand Place. N.W.. in Washington, D. C. known as "Duke’s Mixture.” and thereafter the names “Duke" and "Durham" became practically syn¬ onymous. All this was before the rise of the use of tobacco in the form of cigarettes. In 1870 less than two million were produced in the United States, but ten years later the number had increased to four hundred million, and their use spread even more rapidly there¬ after. The Carr and the Duke firms went into the cigarette busi¬ ness about the some time, but both firms continued to make their respective brands of smoking to¬ bacco. which remained their best seller. Competition between the rival companies was keen, and "Bull Durham" being the older and more widely advertised brand. James B. Duke finally said: "My firm cannot compete with the ’Bull Durham’ brand. I am going into the manufacture of cigarettes’’- and he did At that time cigarettes were made entirely by hand, the work requiring highly trained opera¬ tives, who commanded a wage commensurate with their skill. Under the deft hands of an expert "roller," sometimes as many as two thousand could be produced daily. Finally along came James Bonsack, of Virginia, with an epoch-making invention— a ma¬ chine which would manufacture cigarettes. Although the early ma¬ chine was crude and defective, it would work and would produce 100.000 daily. James B. Duke had the vision and the courage to see its possibilities; he invested heavily in the new machine and took steps patiently to perfect it. The Bonsai machine in the be¬ ginning was to cigarette manu¬ facture about what the original Wright airplane was to aviation, or the original Ford car was to automobiling. Today the Bonsai invention works with the smooth precision of the twelve-cylinder limousine, and the ease of the giant passenger liners which ride (Continued on page 22) э