Bonsack: The Machine That Built Big Tobacco
Near Roanoke, Virginia
This small community along Route Four Sixty between Roanoke and Bedford takes its name from a family whose son changed an entire industry. James Albert Bonsack was born here in Roanoke County on October ninth, eighteen fifty-nine. His father ran a woolen mill, and the boy grew up tinkering with industrial machinery.
In eighteen seventy-five, Richmond tobacco firm Allen and Ginter offered a prize for the first workable cigarette rolling machine. A skilled hand roller could make about four cigarettes per minute, nowhere near fast enough to meet growing demand. Bonsack filed his patent in September of eighteen eighty and received patent number two hundred thirty-eight thousand six hundred forty in March of eighteen eighty-one.
His machine fed tobacco onto a continuous paper strip, automatically formed, pasted, and cut each cigarette, producing two hundred per minute. James Buchanan Duke installed two Bonsack machines in Durham in eighteen eighty-four, matching the output of ninety-six hand rollers. Duke founded the American Tobacco Company in eighteen ninety.
The community of Bonsack still carries the inventor's name, a quiet reminder that the mass-market cigarette was born right here in Virginia's Blue Ridge foothills.
