Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company

The Kinney Tobacco Company was an American cigarette manufacturing firm that created the Sweet Caporal cigarette brand and promoted it with collectible trading cards. Being a leading cigarette manufacturer of the 1870-1880s, it merged in 1890 into the American Tobacco Company.

During the Depression of 1873–79, the production of cigars, pipe, chewing and snuff tobacco in the United States mostly stagnated; however, the cigarette production, on the contrary, took off from 28 million in 1873—to 371 million in 1879. During the first post-depression 1880 year, 533 million cigarettes were manufactured. Until 1880 when James Albert Bonsack invented the first cigarette rolling machine, all cigarettes were rolled manually, on average about four cigarettes per minute by experienced workers.

Seeing the commercial opportunity, Francis S. Kinney, a tobacco manufacturer and founder of the Kinney Tobacco Co. of New York who already experimented with hand-rolled cigarettes starting from 1869, channeled his energies into the mass production of cigarettes with a blend of Turkish and Virginia tobacco in his factories in New York City and Richmond, Virginia. Kinney even invited experienced cigarette-rollers from Europe to serve as instructors. Kinney Tobacco Co. sold cigarettes under the brands of Full Dress, Sweet Caporal, Kinney’s Straight Cut and Sportsman’s Caporal in addition to already established Sweet Caporal Smoking Tobacco. Francis Kinney was joined in business by his brother, Abbot Kinney and the firm became known as Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company.

In the 1870s, Kinney Tobacco Co. along with Allen & Ginter, Goodwin & Co., W.S. Kimball & Co., Marburg Brothers & Co., and F. W. Felgner & Son Co. formed the Big Six of the American cigarette industry; these six tobacco firms jointly controlled 75 percent of the national cigarette business. In 1887, Francis S. Kinney patented an apparatus for delivering packages of cigarettes and a machine for applying saliva-proof mouth pieces to cigarettes (with W. H. Butler), as well as distinctive designs for company's cigarette boxes and cigarette cases. In 1890, Kinney brothers received $5 million in stock after merging their firm into the American Tobacco Company, which acquired control of 90 percent of the cigarette market in the country establishing a corporate trust with near monopoly on cigarette production.

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