Mowe oh DHE UN LTE D. STATES 
HISTCRICAL SKETCH 
Tobacco is one of the products given to the world by the natives of the 
Americas. At the time of the discovery of America, Columbus found the natives 
using tobacco in the forms common today--smoking, chewing, and snuff. Early 
records show that they also understood the essential features of its produc- 
tion as it is now practiced, including the details of proper spacing in the 
field, topping and suckering the plants, and the distinctive drying processes, 
now known as air-curing, sun-curing, and fire-curing. Facts regarding the 
introduction of tobacco to the white race by the Indians, the attention given it 
in the literature of history, poetry, and romance, and its pervasive influence 
in the social and economic affairs of mankind have made this crop unique among 
the products of the soil. 
The rapidity of the expansion of tobacco production over the world was 
phenomenal. By 1531, less than 40 years after the discovery of America, 
Spaniards were cultivating the crop commercially in the West Indies; by 1560, 
it was being grown in Europe as an ornamental plant and for its medicinal 
qualities; by 1580, its commercial culture had extended to Cuba and Venezuela, 
and by about 1600,to Brazil. By 1600 or 1605, mariners and traders had intro- 
duced it into China, Japan, South Africa, and many other countries. 
History records that John Rolfe began the commercial culture of tobacco 
in the English colonies at Jamestown in 1612, and that in 1618, a shipment of 
20,000 pounds was made to England. But tobacco from the Spanish settlements 
had come into use in Europe and the British Isles at least 20 years before the 
Virginia colony was founded, and this meant that at the outset the tobacco 
produced by the colonists was forced to meet the competition of the Spanish 
product in the export market. In spite of this, however, the growing of tobacco 
soon became general in the Virginia colony and production increased rapidly. 
It became the leading item of commerce with the mother country, for it was 
about the only commodity the settlers could produce to exchange for the many 
essential manufactured products needed from England. 
From historical records of the era, we learn that tobacco was such a major 
factor in the economy of the colony at one time that John Rolfe was growing 
it in the streets of Jamestown, and that wives were bought and ministers paid 
with specified quantities of it. 
In colonial days, the only market for tobacco was, of course, the export 
trade. In the seventeenth century, the usual method of marketing was to con- 
sign the tobacco, packed in hogsheads, to an English merchant, who sold it on 
a commission basis and supplied needed manufactured goods in return. This 
system proved generally unsatisfactory to the planter, both because of the 
delay involved in the transaction and the risk encountered in dealing with the 
often unscrupulous English merchants. During the course of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, another method of marketing came into general use, in which the crop was 
sold at the farm to a local British agent, who maintained a "store,'' where the 
planter might secure the manufactured items he needed. This system proved to 
be more satisfactory and became the most popular way of marketing. 
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