R.J. Reynolds and the Camel City

In eighteen seventy-four, a twenty-four-year-old man from Patrick County, Virginia, arrived in the small tobacco market town of Winston. His name was Richard Joshua Reynolds. The town had perhaps four hundred residents. He rented a lot next to the railroad tracks and built what people called the Little Red Factory, a two-story building covering less floor space than a tennis court.

In the spring of eighteen seventy-five, he hired a handful of workers and produced one hundred fifty thousand pounds of chewing tobacco. That was the beginning.

Reynolds understood two things that his competitors did not. First, the railroad made national distribution possible for the first time. Second, American tobacco habits were shifting. Smoking would eventually replace chewing. He invested accordingly.

In nineteen oh seven, Reynolds introduced Prince Albert pipe tobacco, named for the style of coat worn by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband. It became the first truly national tobacco brand. Production in its first four years climbed from two hundred fifty thousand pounds to more than fourteen million.

Then, in nineteen thirteen, he launched the Camel cigarette. The label was drawn from a photograph of Old Joe, a dromedary from the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Camel blended bright leaf and burley tobaccos with a touch of Turkish leaf for aroma, and added sweetener. Americans bought four hundred twenty-five million Camel cigarettes in the first year alone. Four years later, Camel was the most popular cigarette in the United States. By nineteen twenty-five, more than half of all cigarettes smoked in America were Camels.

Winston-Salem became known as Camel City. The population more than doubled between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, briefly making it the largest city in North Carolina. When Reynolds died in nineteen eighteen, his company employed ten thousand people working in one hundred twenty-one buildings across the city.

The fortunes built here funded hospitals, schools, Wake Forest University, and eventually the arts infrastructure that replaced tobacco as the city's identity. The story of Winston-Salem is, in many ways, the story of what one industry does to a city, and what happens after it leaves.