The tobacco industry of North Carolina

The Tobacco Industry of North Carolina.

A Thesis [underlined] Submitted to the North Carolina College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts by Sidney G. Kennedy, for Degree Bachelor of Science, Course in Agriculture. 1897

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The Tobacco Industry of North Carolina.

There is no doubt that the knowledge of tobacco and its uses first came from America. In November 1492 a party sent out by Columbus from the vessels of his first expedition to explore the island of Cuba brought back information that they had seen people carried a lighted firebrand to kindle fire, and perfumed themselves with certain herbs which they carried along with them. The habit of snuff taking was observed and described by Ramon Pane, a Franciscan, who accompained Columbus on his second voyage - 1494 - 6 - and the practice of tobacco-chewing was first seen by the Spaniards on the coast of South America in 1502. As the continent of America was opened up and explored, it became evident that the consumption of tobacco, especially by smoking, was a universal and immemorial usage, in many cases bound up with the most significant and solemn tribal ceremonies.

The term tobacco [underlined] appears not to have been a commonly used original name for the plant, and it has come to us from a peculiar instrument used for inhaling

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its smoke by the inhabitants of San Domingo. It is said that this instrument consisted of a small hollow wooden tube shaped like a Y, the two points of which being inserted in the nose of the smoker, the other end was held in the smoke of burning tobacco, and thus the fumes were inhaled. This apparatus the natives called "taboco". Some claim that the Mexican name of the herb, as far back as the fifteenth century was "tobacco".

The first tobacco plant was taken from this country to Europe in 1558 by Francisco Fernandes, a physician who had been sent by Philip II of Spain to investigate the products of Mexico. Seeds were sent by Jean Nicot, the French Ambassador to Portugal, from the Peninsulas to the Queen Catherine de' Medici. The services rendered by Nicot in spreading a knowledge of the plant have been commemorated in the scientific name of the genus Nicotiana. While the plant came to Europe through Spain, the habit of smoking it was innated and spread through English example. Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, and Sir Francis

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Drake brought with them in 1586, from that first American possession of the English Crown, the implements and materials of tobacco smoking which they handed over to Sir Walter Raleigh. Lane is said to have been the first English smoker, and through the influence of our beloved, "who tooke a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffolde", the habit became rooted among Elizabethean Countries.

Tobacco has been grown in this country as an article of commerce ever since the year 1616, when the Colony in Virginia got its first firm foothold on America's soil. The cultivation of the plant increased with the growth of the colony and very soon became one of the important articles of trade. With the expansion of colony into the lands of the interior the culture of tobacco spread with proportionate rapidity, and the product became almost the sole article of export to England, and the sole medium

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of exchange. With the progress of settlement and the enlargement of colonial territory, North Carolina partook of the agricultural and commercial habit of Virginia. With the one, as with the other, in those days tobacco was the sole product of the field that could bring the needed returns in money, or its equivalent, for the labor bestowed; the only item that encouraged conflict with the wilderness to reduce it to cultivation; the only product that promised future wealth to the newly founded commonwealth. Upon those parts of North Carolina where settlements were made and fields were opened, tobacco was the leading crop, even in those parts where it was subsequently abandoned to be resumed again in our day with more distinction and far more profitable returns. In North Carolina, as in Virginia, tobacco became the currency of the country.

It is well known that until