Antique 1930s - 1940s Sweet Mist Dark Fine Cut Tobacco Bag 🚬 Detroit, MI

Who Made Sweet Mist Tobacco? 🚬 Sweet Mist Dark Fine-Cut Tobacco Bag, Scotten, Dillon Company, Detroit

Size: 5" x 3 1/2" ~ Heavy paper stock with little to no wear.

Antique 1930s - 1940s Sweet Mist Dark Fine Cut Tobacco Bag made by the Scotten Dillon Company tobacco envelope out of Detroit, Michigan. It's a plain tan paper envelope, never filled, printed in black inside a border with little stamp-style edges: SWEET MIST in tall bold capitals, DARK, FINE-CUT, then Scotten, Dillon Company, DETROIT, MICH. At the bottom is the government's fine print: FACTORY NO. 1, DIST. OF MICH., and "NOTICE—The manufacturers of this Tobacco have complied with all the requirements of law. Every person is cautioned, under the penalties of law, not to use this package for Tobacco again." The back is printed simply SWEET MIST, DARK FINE-CUT.

Dark fine-cut was chewing tobacco, and Sweet Mist was one of Scotten, Dillon's chewing brands. You'll find it on old tins too, some with a little scene of cherubs playing in a fountain.

⚖️ What the Fine Print Means

That notice at the bottom goes all the way back to the Civil War. To pay for the war, the federal government taxed tobacco heavily, and it divided the country into 66 tax districts, with fewer than 175 officials to enforce the tobacco taxes in all of them. To stop anybody from refilling an old tax-paid package, the law required a caution notice warning against reusing it, along with the maker's federal factory number and tax district. That's what FACTORY NO. 1, DIST. OF MICH. is: Scotten, Dillon's own number in the Michigan district. Cigar historian Tony Hyman dates the caution notices on cigar boxes from 1868 to 1959, and tobacco packages carried their own version, with the word Tobacco in it, like this one.

🏭 When Detroit Ran on Tobacco

Before it was the Motor City, Detroit was a tobacco town. The tobacco industry was one of the leading parts of the city's economy in the second half of the 1800s, and by the 1890s it was the largest industry in Detroit. The Scotten name was one of the biggest in it. Daniel Scotten, born in Norfolk, England in 1819, came to Detroit in 1853, went into the tobacco business in 1856 with Hiram Granger and William C. Lovett, and by 1882 had his own Daniel Scotten Company, making chewing tobacco, cigars and flake tobacco at the Hiawatha Tobacco Factory in Springwells. It turned out over two million pounds of tobacco in 1883, shipped to England and Hawaii as well as all over the U.S., and by the 1890s it had 1,200 employees and $4 million a year in sales. By the time he retired, the Detroit Historical Society says, he was worth the equivalent of about $64 million today.

Scotten, Dillon Company carried the Scotten name on in Detroit for decades, making plug, chewing and smoking tobacco. It was still signing contracts with Tobacco Workers International Union Local 13 in Detroit in 1948, and it stayed in the city until 1969, when it moved to Gallipolis, Ohio.

It's a neat little piece for a tobacciana collection, a Detroit history shelf or a Michigan den.