The Bonsack Machine and the Making of Durham
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
Before the Civil War, Durham was a railroad depot, a water stop on the North Carolina Railroad, with a population small enough that it barely registered as a town. What changed it was a leaf.
The bright yellow tobacco grown in the North Carolina Piedmont cured differently from other varieties when flue-dried, producing a lighter, milder smoke. Union and Confederate soldiers both passed through Durham County during the war and took the local tobacco with them when they went home. The demand that followed built a market.
Washington Duke came home from the war with fifty cents and a mule and began curing tobacco in a log barn near his farm north of Durham. His sons Benjamin and James joined the business. In eighteen seventy-eight, the firm of W. Duke, Sons and Company was established. James Duke, the younger son, was restless and ambitious in a way that changed everything.
In eighteen eighty-four, James Duke licensed a machine invented by a young Virginian named James Albert Bonsack. The machine could produce one hundred twenty thousand cigarettes in ten hours. A skilled hand-roller could produce four cigarettes per minute. One Bonsack machine replaced forty-eight hand-rollers. Duke installed the first machine in his Durham factory on April thirtieth, eighteen eighty-four. By eighteen eighty-eight, all human cigarette rollers at the Duke factory had been replaced.
The cost savings were enormous. Duke undercut his competitors on price, expanded his advertising nationally, and made the Bull Durham and Duke of Durham brands recognizable across the country. In eighteen ninety, he merged with four rival companies to form the American Tobacco Company. By nineteen hundred, that company held ninety-two point seven percent of American cigarette production.
A United States Supreme Court antitrust ruling in nineteen eleven broke up the trust. The settlement money, along with Duke family wealth accumulated since, funded a forty-million-dollar endowment in nineteen twenty-four that transformed Trinity College into Duke University.
The whole arc, from a railroad water stop to one of the country's leading research universities, runs through one machine installed in a Durham factory in April eighteen eighty-four.
