News-Record.com

Long before Lorillard Tobacco Co. opened a cigarette plant in Greensboro in 1956, and long before it moved its headquarters from New York to here in 1997, men named Pierre Lorillard were making smoke in Guilford County.

Their shotguns blasted away at coveys of quail and plentiful doves.

Pierre Lorillard IV and his son, Pierre Lorillard V, were among dozens of northern industrialists starting in the late 19th century and continuing to the Great Depression who found Guilford a happy hunting ground.

Financier J.P. Morgan liked shooting so much that in 1904, he bought shares in a hunting lodge near Climax. Parts of the lodge survive.

Several others, such as railroad millionaire Jay Gould's son, built a lodge southwest of High Point. Clarence McKay, founder of the Postal Telegraph Service (a competitor of Western Union) had a big house and hunting preserve near Sedgefield. The caretaker's house remains.

Businessman O.W. Bright of New York had a lodge near Whitsett that still stands. Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Cardeza's "Great Oaks," later renamed Reedy Fork, was recently dismantled from its site on U.S. 29 and moved to Chapel Hill, where it's being reassembled.

Lorillard IV and V never built a lodge. Instead, they paid the property taxes to a group of farmers in northern Guilford in return for hunting rights on their land.

In 1898, the Greensboro Patriot reported that Lorillard paid $560 to an agent in High Point to cover the taxes for those farmers.

The Lorillards may have slept and dined in private railroad cars, perhaps parked on rail siding between Greensboro and Stokesdale, along the old Atlanta & Yadkin Railroad. Most super-wealthy people of that era had rail cars.

Lorillard IV, who died in 1901, came to Guilford first, probably in the 1890s, not too long after he made his greatest innovation - and it wasn't a new brand of cigarettes. In the late 1880s, he designed the formal attire for men known as the tuxedo. He named it after Tuxedo Park, N.Y., the town he developed for rich people like himself north of New York City.

Pierre V was still hunting in Guilford as late as 1924. The newspaper listed "P. Lorillard" among the 37 northern industrialists who had paid $10.50 for a license to hunt.

The newspaper always identified the Lorillards as P. Lorillard, possibly because the company was named P. Lorillard Tobacco Co. until it became just Lorillard in 1968.

The tobacco company is named for the original Pierre Lorillard, a French immigrant who founded the company in New York in 1760.

Although Lorillard was bought by American Tobacco Co. in 1910 and then became independent again a few years later, at least one Lorillard remained active with the company when it opened its Greensboro plant at East Market and English streets.

Herbert A. Kent, the company's chairman and president who came for the grand opening, had Lorillard blood, if the genology found recently on a Web site is correct.

It says Emily Lorillard, Pierre IV's daughter, married Herbert Kent in 1882. They had a child the next year, whom they named Herbert Kent.

It was probably that Herbert Kent, or perhaps his son, who rose to become president and board chairman of P. Lorillard Tobacco Co. in the 1950s.

The company's Kent cigarette brand was named for Herbert Kent when it was introduced in 1952. He apparently was the last family member who worked for the company. A 1960 publication on the company's 60th anniversary said the comany lacked Lorillards, although Kent was listed as a consultant.

The question, for which an answer may never be known, is whether the visits of Pierre Lorillard IV and V had anything to do with the company eventually opening what's now its only surviving plant in Greensboro.

Maybe Pierre V brought Herbert Kent here as a child on a hunting trip. Kent may have liked what he saw. When it came time for the company to build a new plant, he chose Greensboro.

Or it could be just one of those historical quirks, and the Lorillards were here long before their plant and headquarters.

There are still Pierre Lorillards out there. One man with that name - and without any roman numerals - is an assistant film director in Hollywood.