Page 7 - Demo

1At one time there were more black residents in Lynchburg than white.
According to the 2010 Federal Census, 29 percent of Lynchburg’s population identified itself as black or African American. For twenty-first-century residents it may come as a surprise
that in 1880, the census recorded a 53 percent black majority in the city, and for most of the period 1840–1890,
a full half of the city’s residents were African American. These figures are largely tied to the shifting fortunes of the tobacco industry in Virginia, which heavily depended on black labor.
2African American tobacco laborers made Lynchburg a place of great wealth and fame in the nineteenth century.
For most of the 1800s Lynchburg
was known worldwide for one
thing: tobacco. “Here is the heart of Tobaccodom,” remarked one travel writer in the national magazine Harper’s Weekly in 1879. Another noted in 1882 that the Hill City “has always ranked
at the front in everything pertaining to tobacco.” By the mid-1880s, Lynchburg had become the largest loose tobacco market in the world, and Lone Jack, the most famous brand of chewing tobacco manufactured in Lynchburg, was a household name across the country.
African Americans were absolutely essential to the size and success of Lynchburg’s tobacco industry. They filled local tobacco factories and warehouses by the hundreds, working
as pickers, stemmers, rollers, twisters, prizers, and general “hands.” Their cheap labor—first as slaves, and later
as low-wage employees—enabled tobacconists like Jesse Hare and John W. Carroll to amass small fortunes.
The particular tobacco product manufactured in Lynchburg, called “plug” or chewing tobacco, required “considerable manipulation” by hand, from sorting and stemming raw leaves, to twisting and pressing seasoned leaves into compact cakes or “plugs.” Black Lynchburgers made this very labor- intensive industry possible, and very profitable.
“Scene in a Lynchburg Tobacco Factory,” by J. Wells Champney
From Edward King’s The Great South (1875)
Residence of wealthy tobacconist John W. Carroll, 1102 Harrison Street (built 1874)
SPRING/SUMMER 2013 21
Source: U.S. Census Bureau