Remember When: Ole Buck Duke (1856-1925)

(theleafchronicle.com) ... James Buchanan Duke had gobbled up more than 200 rival tobacco companies by 1890, when he was still under the age of 35. One of them was Lucky Strike. Duke stacked together these gobbled-up firms and hung them under one big tobacco name – American Tobacco Company, which eventually accounted for 82 percent of all tobacco used in the U.S. Good for ole greedy young Buck Duke.
Really? But what about the sunup-to-sundown, hard-working farmer sweating and straining who actually hung his tobacco, up to five tiers up, in a tobacco barn on a hot-as-Hades August day? And all that was after he’d toiled away since plant bed time last January. The more tobacco he raised and hung, the more ragged he became. Why? Continued