﻿2 BULLETIN 16, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



Up to a time just before the Civil War, however, the production 

 of this yellow type of tobacco was confined principally to Caswell 

 County, N. C, and Pittsylvania County, Va. The real development 

 in the flue-cured type did not take place until during the decades 

 immediately succeeding that in which the Civil War occurred, and 

 on its present basis, therefore, it is essentially a modern type. 



A number of important and clearly defined factors are easily 

 discernible as stimulating and promoting this development. From 

 the standpoint of consumption, the demand was rapidly expanded 

 by the growing popularity of pipe smoking in this country, for 

 which this flue-cured type, in the form of granulated smoking 

 tobaccp, proved to be highly satisfactory, and also to the introduc- 

 tion and rapid expansion in use of machine-made cigarettes. The 

 greatly enhanced demand for tobacco of this type also extended to 

 foreign countries, especially to Great Britain and certain of the 

 British possessions. Supplementary to this great expansion in 

 demand, resulting in good prices for the raw leaf, production was 

 also markedly stimulated during this same period by the introduc- 

 tion of commercial fertilizers, upon which the profitable production 

 of flue-cured tobacco now so largely depends. By the middle eighties, 

 therefore, the producing area and use of flue-cured tobacco had 

 greatly enlarged and covered, as a crop of dominant importance, 

 some 20 counties in the northern part of central and western North 

 Carolina and in south central Virginia, thus embracing the Old Belt 

 section about as it is known to-day. Prior to about 1890 little 

 tobacco was grown east of Warren, Franklin, and Wake Counties, 

 N. C. During the nineties the demand for flue-cured tobacco, 

 especially of the brighter types, continued to expand, and in this 

 same period the price of cotton was very low. This combination of 

 circumstances resulted in a widely extended movement on the part 

 of the farmers of eastern North Carolina and South Carolina to try 

 tobacco growing where formerly attention had been given almost 

 exclusively to cotton. So rapidly was the acreage expanded through- 

 out this cotton-growing Coastal Plain section of eastern North Caro- 

 lina and South Carolina, now known as the New Belt, that in 1903 

 this new section actually produced more tobacco than was grown 

 in the Old Belt section. Because of this large production in the 

 New Belt, the total crop of flue-cured tobacco of that year for both 

 the New Belt and the Old Belt amounted to upward of 250,000,000 

 pounds, the largest crop produced up to the present time. This 

 great crop year ushered in a period of lower prices, and production 

 dropped off markedly in succeeding years, particularly in the New 

 Belt, where attention was again turned to cotton, for which prices 

 for several years were comparatively good. In 1911 and 1912 the 

 flue-cured tobacco crop was considerably curtailed because of very 



