This picture, taken some time after 1910, depicts African American employees of the American Sumatra Tobacco Company in Quincy, Gadsden County, Florida [1].
Formed by a merger of twelve growers in 1910, the American Sumatra Tobacco Company owned 34,000 acres of land in Georgia and Florida. Their 41 shade tobacco farms produced one-half of all tobacco in the region in the early 1900s [2].
References Cited
[1] “Employees of the American Sumatra Tobacco Company,”State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/3353, accessed 23 Mar 2013.
[2] Pando, Robert T. 2003 Shrouded in Cheesecloth: the Demise of Shade Tobacco in Florida and Georgia. Master’s Thesis, Florida State University, Electronic Theses and Dissertations, http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11142003-204324/, accessed 23 Mar 2013.
My father worked for this company as a young man in the late 1930’s.
Would love to know more about the company that my father workes for as a young man.
Oh wow, Kannee. Two good places to check would be Google Books, and you can search archivegrid.org to see if the company’s papers are held in an archive anywhere. Please let us know how it goes!
Toni