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 
tobacco, 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 
