Tobacco furnishers
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996
From: Emily Bingham
Subject: Query on tobacco furnisher
Can anyone tell me what it means to be a tobacco furnisher? This term was applied to a Jewish merchant in a small North Carolina town in the first decade of the nineteenth century. I need help picturing what he did. Also, the source is not the most reliable, and I want to be sure this was a term appropriate to the period.
Thanks in advance, Emily Bingham
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996
From: David Herr
"Furnishers" were merchants who supplied the equipment, seed, and necessary supplies for living until the tobacco or cotton (or, one might assume, any agricultural crop) was harvested. Furnishing merchants extended credit and frequently demanded that the harvested crop be consigned to them (thus controlling to some extent the selling price). This tended to perpetuate the "credit" hold that merchants exercised in southern agriculture. Although different in some ways, the furnishing merchants were similar to the "factors" of the pre-Civil War era.
RoeschHous@aol.com
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He/she would be a "furnishing merchant," one who furnished supplies on credit for agriculturalists.
Tony Carey, Auburn University
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I presume that, as with cotton furnishers, he's supplying tobacco farmers out of his store for the year in return for a lien on the crop.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
Humanities & Social
Sciences Online
