Carolina Brights Ad - Let's See Some Carolina Brights Cards

[jimonym]

Recently I came across this huge half-page ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (July 9, 1905) for Carolina Brights Cigarettes. It predates the T206 release by several years, but I thought it was cool nonetheless.



A couple things:
The Wells-Whitehead Company was acquired by the American Tobacco Company in 1903, but the change in control was kept concealed from the public. Obviously that had changed by 1910, when the manufacture of Carolina Brights cigarettes had been shifted from Wilson, NC, to the ATC’s factory in Richmond (Factory No. 25) and the brand was included in their T206 release. So this ad demonstrates one of the ATC’s favorite anti-competitive practices: the policy of disguising ownership and using smaller, controlled companies to secure for themselves the benefit of public sentiment against the Trust. The kicker here is the highlighting of union labor being used; the ATC itself was notoriously anti-union, and in response many labor unions organized boycotts of their products and/or sought to support the business of independent companies.

The Hancock Cigar Company was a Richmond wholesaler. I found also a small column on them from a week earlier in the same newspaper. It’s clear from the ad and the column that Carolina Brights was being targeted to Richmond, to Virginia, and to the Southeast region. Not sure if that geographic distribution persisted until 1910, but kind of interesting nonetheless.



Anyway, let’s see some T206 Carolina Bright cards.