I am always fed up with the local provincial blowhards who like to say that brightleaf tobacco happened by accident, and that the Durham tobacco industry got its start from pillaging Yankee soldiers who wrote back for more. I am also ever frustrated with the know-nothings at WUNC who keep airing this stuff (and who repeatedly refer to Bennett Place as Bennett Point.) Morons, all.
I’ll have a book—it’ll be my third book, btw—that details the efforts of farmers like Abisha Slade and his colleagues in the Hyco Agricultural Society who experimented for years on curing methods to achieve brightleaf and spent even more years marketing the method to other farmers in central Virginia and North Carolina. (Yeah, there already is a book that does this… Nannie Mae Tilley’s The Bright-Tobacco Industry, but the only press people pay attention to these days, apparently, is the self-publishing history houses.) And then my book will tell how Durham tobacco became regionally, then nationally known because Washington Duke hauled his skinny ass and his smoking tobacco to every dry goods merchant between Wilmington and Pittsburg and Julian Carr deployed an army of salesmen and innovative advertisers.
That’s what I’m going to do.
Ppppt-tyng!
p.s. I can't believe I still have to say this, but Bull Durham smoking tobacco was not a W. Duke & Sons product. It was Julian Carr's.
