Tobacco history series; [a chapter in America's industrial growth]

Wisconsin

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obti^co

MADISON MILWAUKEE

STOUGHTON
EDGERTON
JANESVILLE

A Chapter in America's Industrial Growth

IGibrary

For more than a century Wisconsin has been a major
producer of tobacco. Currently, more of a cigar leaf
type is grown in the state than in any other tobacco-
producing area in the Union. The people of the
Badger State are large-scale consumers of tobacco.
The estimated wholesale value of cigarettes alone
distributed in Wisconsin in 1959 came to more than
$75 million. In the same year the total value of
tobacco products disposed of was in the range of $90
million. The activities of the 6,000 Wisconsin farm
families who grow tobacco and their numerous
helpers in the fields, of the factories that produce
cigars and smoking tobacco, of the retail outlets that
meet consumer needs, and the tax yield from the
excise on cigarettes contribute to the economic and
fiscal advantage of the state. This booklet reports
briefly on the tobacco industry in Wisconsin and
presents the major facts in its long history.

Tobacco History Series

THE TOBACCO INSTITUTE, INC.

910 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D. C.
1960

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Wisconsin and
Tobacco

round the time that the Democratic
national convention nominated James K. Polk for the
presidency in 1844, settlers were crowding into Wis-
consin Territory. Among their essential supplies was cer-
tain to be a good quantity of tobacco ready for use. The
Chippewas — in whose language "Wisconsin" meant
"grassy place"- the Winnebagos, and other tribes grew
tobacco. But newcomers to lands inhabited by Indians
invariably rejected the harsh native tobacco, having
long accustomed themselves to the superior leaf pro-
duced in various eastern and southern American states.
Before their supplies ran out — and an ardent chewer
or smoker could consume a surprising amount of to-
bacco in a short time — settlers were growing and curing
leaf produced on their own lands. There was no thought
then that this agriculture might develop valuable cash

/

c

crops. The only interest of those pioneer farmers was to
produce enough leaf for their immediate personal needs.
The rich soil of Wisconsin was highly suitable, how-
ever, for a valuable tobacco type: cigar-binder leaf. As
new settlers came in, production spread. It spread on
such a scale that it soon passed the limited boundaries
required by personal use and developed into an impor-
tant industry.

asli crops and consumer goods

Today, Wisconsin grows a substantial part of the
nation's cigar leaf: over 20.5 million pounds in 1959, pro-
duced in some 20 counties on tracts ranging from one-
half to 10 or 12 acres. This production, about half of the
national total in its category, is represented by two types
of leaf, classified as Southern Wisconsin and Northern
Wisconsin. (A small portion of the latter is grown in
Minnesota. ) The official designation for the types grown
in the Wisconsin- Minnesota area is "cigar-binder leaf."
Its class name does not, however, indicate the uses to
which manufacturers put it. It has long been used for
non-binder purposes. Its final manufacturing form de-
pends on such factors as grade, year of production, and
price.

The only diflFerences between the two types result
from the soil in which each is grown. The average price
of the former in 1959 was 30.1 cents a pound for straight
stripped and crop lots. Northern Wisconsin leaf aver-
aged 43.6 cents a pound; stemming grades, 37.3 cents a
pound. The year's overall harvest brought very close to
$7 million to Wisconsin farmers. This ranked it first in
dollar value per acre. Some 6,000 farm families employ-

c

ing an estimated 19,000 workers harvested the rich crop.

Most of the stalk-cut, air-cured crop was used in the
manufacture of cigars or went to the stemming trade for
scrap chewing tobacco. About 350,000 pounds during
October 1959- April 1960 was exported, chiefly to West
Germany.

Over 11 million cigars, mainly in the low and medium
price classes, were produced in over two dozen regis-
tered Wisconsin factories or small shops, about haK of
them in Milwaukee. Seven factories in the state manu-
factured more than 150,000 pounds of smoking tobacco
and over 8,000 pounds of scrap chewing tobacco in the
last full year of record, 1958.

onsumer outlets and treasuries* Income

Despite the local availability of inexpensive cigars, the
people of the Badger State, together with most of their
fellow Americans, show a marked preference for ciga-
rettes. In 1959, for instance, they bought over 428 million
packages, paying a state tax of five cents in addition to a
federal excise of eight cents on each package. The orig-
inal state tax, instituted in 1939, was two cents a package.
The excise was increased three times, becoming five
cents in 1958. In the decade since 1950 to June 30, 1959,
the gross yield from the Wisconsin cigarette tax totaled
$135,344,000. Disposition of this revenue included re-
habilitation costs for World War II veterans, construc-
tion and improvement of state institutions, and public
works projects to relieve postwar unemployment.

Tobacco has always been of enormous fiscal value.
Since the federal excise on manufactured tobacco prod-
ucts was estabhshed in 1862 (with cigarettes first in-

eluded in 1864), the total yield to the national treasury
has been in the range of $39 billion.

Some 40,000 outlets serve Wisconsin tobacco con-
sumers. Retail stores are the largest merchandisers of
tobacco goods, with vending machines a conspicuous
second. The amount spent for all tobacco supplies is
impressive. A 1959 trade estimate of the wholesale value
of products distributed in Wisconsin comes close to $90
milhon. Cigarettes represent, as elsewhere in the United
States, the major part of this trade: over $75 million. The
estimated wholesale value of cigars distributed in the
same year was a httle over $10 million.

The income derived from their crops by tobacco
farmers, the wages of field workers and production em-
ployees in various factories, the considerable value of
the retail trade, and the tax yield to the state's treasury
from cigarette sales, and other operations of the industry
are all of importance in Wisconsin's economy.

Supplementing these economic elements are numer-
ous Wisconsin manufacturers, some of them large
organizations, who are suppliers to the tobacco trade.
Among these are makers of machinery and several who
produce paper products essential to tobacco manufac-
turers. The agriculture of tobacco generates a consider-
able amount of goods and services from numerous unre-
lated industries.

Tobacco crops are marketed by the "country sales
method," being sold privately by the grower on his farm
or through cooperatives. After sales, the leaf is delivered
to Viroqua, Edgerton, Janesville, Stoughton, and else-
where. These deliveries entail the use of sorting houses
and tobacco warehouses, each requiring a labor force,
transportation services, materials and maintenance.

G

rowth story

Walworth County appears to have been the site where
tobacco was first grown by some enterprising settlers in
1844, though some authorities credit Fulton Township,
Rock County, in the late 1840's. Whichever the actual
site, the initial eflFort was not a commercial success. The
practical start of Wisconsin's fruitful tobacco industry
came in 1853. Two farmers from Ohio, Ralph Pomeroy
and J. J. Heistand, new in Wisconsin, sowed two acres of
Broadleaf near Edgerton in Rock County. When their
crop was ready for market they tied the leaves in conven-
tional "hands," baled the lot and sold it locally for 4V2
cents a pound. The buyer, being short of ready money,
bought on credit the first sound, commercial tobacco pro-
duced in Wisconsin. His intentions were good, but he fell
by the wayside and the sellers had to settle for 50 cents on
the dollar. Not discouraged, the two farmers produced a
larger and better crop — and sold it for cash.

Wisconsin was ready then for the agriculture of to-
bacco as a commercial enterprise. A State of the Union
since 1848, it was rapidly developing settlements of
mixed populations. At first, there were Southerners who
reached the Territory through the Mississippi River
route, then Cornishmen —7,000 by 1850 — working Wis-
consin's lead mines since 1824, then Yankees and large
numbers of New Yorkers. A special census in 1836 indi-
cated a territorial population of 11,000. By 1840, the
number of settlers had tripled. Scandinavians began to
flock in and Irishmen, too. By 1850 the Irish were three
times as numerous as settlers from elsewhere in the
United Kingdom. A German minister, accompanied by a

military friend, in 1853 was encouraging north Germans
to migrate to Wisconsin. They were successful in their
missionary work and there was a steady influx of Ger-
mans for many years thereafter. One of them, Bernard
Leidersdorf, an emigrant from Hanover in 1858, devel-
oped in Milwaukee the largest tobacco manufacturing-
jobbing business in Wisconsin.

K

antasies and facts

That was a period in which American folklore was
being enriched by tall tales of "Cousin Jack" of the
Cornish lead miners and that noted boss bullwhacker of
Paul Bunyan's camps, "Brimstone Bill." Wide-eyed new-
comers were telling each other of the sea serpents seen
in Wisconsin's lakes.

A fortunate lumberjack of the time made a local hero

of himself by announcing that he had come upon Paul
Bunyan in a remote part of a forest. The mighty man was
seated, cleaning his tobacco pipe with a five-foot pike
pole. The pole was just long enough to go through the
stem.

Thereupon the experts in mythology and physiology
came to a conclusion, based on statistical evidence. They
determined that, as the stem of the pipes then in use
was reckoned as one-tenth of the height of a man, Paul
Bunyan could be only 50 feet tall. This calculation of
height was well below that held by general opinion. It
was promptly disputed by other experts of the time.

These authorities emphasized a point which everyone
accepted: when Paul was smoking, it required the steady
service of a stoker using a scoop shovel to keep the
bowl filled with tobacco. As such a bowl would, obvi-
ously, require a longer stem than that estimated by the

Steamboat landing
at La Crosse, 1872

lumberjack reporter, Paul, too, must have been longer,
much longer, than a mere 50 feet.

Anyone making his new home in Wisconsin who was
not accustomed to tobacco in some form would have
been a rare person. There simply wasn't enough local
tobacco to meet consumer demand. Tobacco crops from
numerous small plots were very limited and the 1850
census reported the state total as only 1,268 pounds.
Around 1854 over 840,000 pounds of tobacco, chiefly
from Virginia and Connecticut, was entered at tlie port
of Milwaukee to help supply the rapidly growing market.

-Lobacco agriculture builds towns

Tobacco as a cash crop began to be grown by eastern-
ers and Norwegians in the region around Viroqua, by
others near Edgerton, Oregon and elsewhere in the
state, bringing prosperity to these settlements and devel-
oping villages into towns. Edgerton's produce, shortly
after 1854, became abundant and profitable. By 1860
Edgerton tobacco farmers were able to ship their crop
(500 cases of 400 pounds each) to Milwaukee, Chicago
and markets in eastern states, after supplying local needs.

The Civil War gave a stimulus to production. The
major producing areas centered at first in Rock and Dane
Counties ( the Southern Wisconsin type ) and later in the
century in Vernon and Crawford Counties (the Northern
Wisconsin type). Production of cigar-leaf tobacco,
originally used as wrappers for Havana fillers, totaled
87,000 pounds in 1860, most of it from Walworth County.
In 1869 a close estimate showed a harvest of a million
pounds of leaf, with a total cash value of $187,000. All

but a small portion of this was produced in Rock and
Dane Counties.

The two original farmers in Rock County had experi-
mentally planted cigar-leaf tobacco using seeds then
readily available in Ohio. The high quality of their crops
suggested to other farmers that the soil of Wisconsin was
especially suitable for cigar-leaf tobacco. Various impor-
tations of seeds into the state began to take place.

A Janes ville farmer acquired Connecticut- Havana
seed from Massachusetts in 1872. The resulting variety,
known as Comstock Spanish, was soon being widely pro-
duced in the Wisconsin area where it was first grown.
There were other importations of seeds of types growing
around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and in Connecticut.
The older Wisconsin seedleaf tobacco developed from
the latter was long locally called "Housatonic" or "Big-
seed" to differentiate it from Havana varieties.

Fe

arm economy and development

Just before 1880, when the agriculture of tobacco in
various Wisconsin districts had become standardized,
the records of a successful farmer, Thomas Hutson of
Edgerton, showed that the cost of operation— cultivating,
curing and marketing— for each acre of seedleaf tobacco
averaged $61.25. He obtained 1,600 pounds of tobacco,
as a rule, from each acre. As this produce was sold for
$112 an acre, the profit was described as "handsome."

All but a few tobacco farms, particularly in northern
areas where the major occupation was dairying, were
small, usually one to four acres. These farms, chiefly
operated by Scandinavians, so increased in extent that

The Port of Milwaukee, 1881

lO

in 1918 they produced 62,400,000 pounds of tobacco
which sold for $13,728,000. Following a trend, in 1923
farmers organized a cooperative, the Northern Wiscon-
sin Tobacco Pool. In its first year this organization con-
trolled close to 75 percent of the state's tobacco farms.
During the Second World War cigar-leaf production
dropped because of a decline in cigar consumption and
in chewing. Yet the 1945 crop of over 36 million pounds
brought more than $15 million to tobacco farmers.

R

oilers and collectors

Tobacco factories, centered in Milwaukee, were pro-
viding large-scale employment by the third quarter of
the 19th century. The census report of 1880 showed that
152 factories produced cigars valued at $1,346,925. The
output of chewing and smoking tobacco and snuff, by
three factories in Milwaukee, was valued at $978,281.

Cigars were much in demand, chiefly by Wisconsin's
German population, and good rollers were much sought
after. Prizes for extra output were frequently offered.
One roller, William George Bruce, a native American,
related in his memoirs that, while still in his teens in
the 1870's, he had won a first prize: "$2.00 and free beer,
having rolled up something over 5,000 cigars from Mon-
day morning to Saturday noon." A good craftsman, his
wages were $18 weekly.

The Internal Revenue Bureau of the time collected
on all tobacco manufacturing and associated operations.
The reported total of receipts from Wisconsin manufac-
turers, dealers, leaf handlers and others for the year 1880
came to $941,764. Included was $758 collected from

11

"peddlers of tobacco." The small amount received from
these itinerant merchants, so welcome to farm families
in outlying districts, did not necessarily mean that ped-
dlers were few in number or that they sold comparatively
little tobacco. It is far more probable that these rugged
individualists on the retail level had developed their own
methods of making only token payments to revenue
ofiBcers.

The record of tobacco in Wisconsin, briefly related in
the foregoing pages, indicates how that agricultural com-
modity helped in the building of a state, as it had in many
other sections of America. The labor and products of
Wisconsin's tobacco farmers developed towns, created
new business enterprises and otherwise aided the econ-
omy. For more than a century fields of tobacco have
dotted Wisconsin's landscape. For the better part of the
past century the quality of Wisconsin tobacco has main-
tained ready outlets among manufacturers of tobacco
products in the United States.

Milwaukee River at Milwaukee, 1872

13

Current data on various divisions of the tobacco industry in Wiscx)nsin
have been derived from publications of the United States Department
of Agriculture, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture and its Crop
Reporting Service, and the Internal Revenue Service. The Director of
the Wisconsin Food and Tobacco Institute at Madison, Anthony E.
Madler, provided valuable information. Publications of the Tobacco
Tax Coimcil ( Richmond, Virginia ) were another useful source.

Sources of historical data were bulletins of the Wisconsin State De-
partment of Agriculture, of the University of Wisconsin Agricultural
Experiment Station and University research bulletins; Wisconsin, A
Guide to the Badger State, Federal Writers' Project of the WPA (1941);
S. Chapman, Handbook of Wisconsin (1855); "Statistics of Manufac-
turers of Tobacco . . ." J. R. Dodge and "Report on . . . Tobacco," J. B.
Killebrew, both in Report on the Productions of Agriculture (Tenth
Census) (1883), and the Wiscor^sin Magazine of History. The quotation
on p. 11 appears in the Magazine, vol. XVII, no. 1 ('1933).

Permission to quote directly from this booklet is granted.

Additional copies will be made available without charge

upon request to The Tobacco Institute, Inc.

910 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D. C.