Lewis Ginter’s Cigarettes
by Brian Burns 09.2021
Graphic by Doug Dobey
In the nineteenth century, Lewis Ginter was celebrated in Richmond, Virginia. But if he were alive today, he’d probably get a much colder reception. He clung to the ideals of his time.
In the 1850s, early in his career, he amassed a fortune as a dry goods wholesaler. He also co-owned a bank and a life insurance company. He served as a commissary during the Civil War, but Southern defeat evaporated the vast majority of his wealth. Quickly rebounding as a banker-broker in New York City, he lost a second fortune in 1869 when the gold bubble burst.
He was desperate for a comeback. For one thing, female relatives relied on him for financial support – a duty men of his time took seriously. After assessing market conditions, he in 1872 turned to the manufacturing sector back in affordable Richmond. Partnering with longtime tobacconist John F. Allen, they manufactured chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco and a small line of cigars.
In 1875, Ginter added Turkish tobacco cigarettes to his product line. Amid the devastation of war and a gloomy, national depression, he provided desperately-needed jobs for white women and girls, who hand-rolled the “dainty” smokes. Cigarette-making provided economic hope and boosted civic pride. In 1876, under the headline “Beautiful Tobacco,” the editor of the Richmond Dispatch crowed, “No city in this country is ahead of Richmond and her enterprising tobacco manufacturers in the style of goods they turn out.”
About this same time, Ginter pioneered cigarettes made entirely with mild bright leaf, grown only in the Virginia and North Carolina piedmont. He received encouragement from all sides. He was answering the call to revitalize the South’s postwar economy and reestablish his city’s prewar dominance of the tobacco trade. “The people of Richmond should...encourage everything, every turn of trade,” preached the editor of the Richmond Dispatch. “The future wealth and populousness of Richmond will give increase of wealth and general improvement to the whole State.” In similar tones, Governor Kemper insisted that “the awakening hands of capital and labor” were vital – not just to improving Virginia’s economy, but to paying down its pre-war debt. The state’s “unblemished honor” was at stake, he said. In this highly-charged environment, Ginter’s cigarette enterprise made him a paragon of civic virtue.
The industrial revolution promised unimaginable wealth for hard-charging entrepreneurs. So, putting on his marketing hat, Ginter tastefully displayed the Allen & Company product line at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. His quality cigarettes won top prizes and accolades. He relished any opportunity to make his beloved city shine.
Following the Centennial, Richmond entrepreneurs followed Ginter into cigarette manufacturing, providing more economic hope.
Around 1880, Ginter changed his firm name to Allen & Ginter. Over the next few years, as rolling machines came on the scene and cigarettes grew in fashion, the Dispatch called cigarette-making a “great and growing industry.”
Still, it wasn’t easy to convince Southern men to part with their chewing tobacco. So, without wasting a second, Ginter marketed his bright leaf cigarettes, “Richmond Gems,” in London as a foreign novelty. There, by the early 1880s, they won popular favor. Elite gentlemen smoked them by the thousands in the palatial men’s clubs. On the heels of this success, Ginter entered markets all over the world, including France, Belgium, Germany and Australia. While Richmond’s Chamber of Commerce had bragging rights, Ginter was well on his way to a third fortune.
In 1890, he and four other major cigarette manufacturers merged to form the American Tobacco Company. The deal personally netted him about $3.5 million in American Tobacco stock (approximately $100 million in 2020 currency). He gradually sold off much of it to boost Richmond’s prosperity and image. The eye-popping Jefferson Hotel would never have been built without Ginter’s cigarettes. The same goes for the Mechanics Institute, a technical school on Broad Street that for decades addressed Richmond’s severe lack of skilled labor. And, at a time when the city’s muddy roads were a national embarrassment, Ginter built some of the smoothest paved roads anywhere. They spurred upscale streetcar suburbs and welcomed Northern tourists to the former Confederate capital.
Dollars and cents aside, Ginter’s foray into cigarettes bespoke his elite sensibilities. As a world traveler, connoisseur and former fancy goods importer, he had long been attuned to luxury, fashion and refinement. Newspapers romanced the chic cigarette. In 1883, the St. Paul Daily Globe proclaimed, “Society has accepted the cigarette as the most genteel medium by which the delightful blue smoke can be conveyed between the lips.” Cigarettes were considered far more civilized than chewing tobacco, which was sloppily splattered everywhere.
The cigarette did have its detractors – beyond Richmond, at least. But at that early date, they were long on opinion and short on science. In 1884, for example, the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union asserted tobacco caused disease, “especially the loss of sight, paralysis, prostration, and scores of ailments hitherto credited to other sources,” and that it “lower[ed] the standard of morality.” Some newspaper editors claimed cigarettes caused all sorts of ills, from anemia to ear inflammation to “brain fever.” Others accused cigarette manufacturers of using drug additives like opium or arsenic-laced cigarette paper.
Adding to consumer confusion were doctors who touted tobacco’s therapeutic qualities. They claimed it aided digestion, cured gout, provided “solace” amid life’s daily challenges, and even helped one think.
Buried deep in a late-1870s marketing brochure, Ginter’s firm extolled the virtues of “high grade bright Virginia leaf,” asserting that “in its relations to health and as a luxury it should have no competition.”
If we fast forward two decades to 1897, shortly before Ginter’s death, we get a rare glimpse of his personal views on the subject. According to a blurb in the New York Press, he advised a friend’s pre-teen nephew “never to smoke.” Had Ginter’s thinking evolved? Or was there more to the story?