Tobacco, Textiles, and Furniture, The Three-Legged Economy

For most of the twentieth century, three industries wrote the economic story of North Carolina. You could almost map the state by them. Drive east toward the coastal plain and the smell of curing tobacco hung over every small town from October through November.

Move into the Piedmont and the air carried lint, cotton fiber drifting from the mill windows onto the sidewalks of a hundred towns. Head to the western Piedmont and the Foothills and you heard the whine of saws and the knock of doweling machines from furniture factories that made High Point one of the largest furniture production and trade centers on earth. Tobacco had roots going back to the colonial era, but it was the development of the bright-leaf variety in the eighteen thirties, and the invention of mechanized cigarette-rolling equipment in the eighteen eighties, that turned it into an industrial empire.

James Buchanan Duke of Durham built the American Tobacco Company in eighteen ninety, briefly controlling something close to the entire American cigarette market before the Supreme Court broke up the trust in nineteen eleven. By nineteen fifty, North Carolina grew more tobacco than any other state. The cotton mills arrived in the post-Civil War decades, deliberately built in the Piedmont to take advantage of fast-moving rivers and a rural labor force.

By the early twentieth century North Carolina had more textile workers than any state in the South. The industry was the defining economic fact of entire communities, mill villages where the company owned the housing, the store, sometimes the church. Furniture manufacturing concentrated in Guilford, Forsyth, and Catawba counties, with High Point at the center.

By the mid-twentieth century the High Point Furniture Market, now called the High Point Market, was one of the two largest furniture trade shows in the world. All three industries have contracted sharply since the nineteen nineties, as global competition hollowed out the Piedmont mill towns. The buildings often remain.

The jobs mostly do not.