1875 - Tobacco

Tobacco

R. J. Reynolds Company has its beginnings in a Winston, North Carolina, factory set up by former tobacco peddler Richard Joshua Reynolds, 25, who has amassed $7,500 in capital working in partnership with his father. With an investment of $2,400, he builds a 36- by 60-foot frame structure and equips it with a few crude pieces of machinery, uses the rest of the money to buy leaf tobacco, and begins manufacturing pipe tobacco from burley leaf (Winston has become a center for bright tobacco production) (see 1889; Slade brothers, 1852; Prince Albert, 1907).

Richmond, Virginia, tobacco merchants Lewis Ginter and John F. Allen go into partnership to produce cigarettes from domestic bright tobacco. The cigarettes have a light smoke and a cheap price that soon wins them wide popularity (see 1888).

U.S. cigarette production reaches 50 million but will increase rapidly after 1882 when a cigarette manufacturing machine invented 3 years ago comes into commercial use. The machine feeds tobacco to a ribbon of paper as it is drawn from a spool, the edges pass over a gummed wheel, and a continuous cigarette is produced that the machine then cuts into separate lengths.