Richard Jackson’s Snuff Mill Memories

Living links to the Demuth Snuff Mill grow increasingly sparse with the passing of time, so a stroll with Richard Jackson and his wife Phyllis - through the 1798-1859 structure now undergoing preservation, one of the city’s oldest surviving commercial buildings - recently proved of inestimable value in the Foundation’s continuing efforts to preserve the Demuth family’s contributions to Lancaster history. Richard Jackson was a high school student in the early Fifties when his father - a long-time employee in the cigar and snuff manufactory - got him a summer job there. Snuff was no longer being made, and the once thriving business that had employed over two dozen people had dwindled to three: an elderly woman who ran a machine that removed stems from tobacco leaves, two elderly men - one named Clayton and the other (now nameless) from Marietta who made cigars - plus Richard Jackson during one of his teen-age summers. There was no gate at the entry from Mifflin Street then, nor was there a gate in the “beautiful flower gardens” to join the houses where the two Demuth family branches lived. The snuff mill had ceased operations a decade earlier, but young Jackson worked on its otherwise deserted first floor, where he made up packages of chewing tobacco. When bales of scrap tobacco arrived, purchased from the Cooper Tobacco Company, he was obliged “to get the thing up on the bench here and break it down and then flop it with my hands. You know, just make it look like a big, huge pile of leaves laying in there, just little, tiny chunks. What they called the ‘plain scraps.’. . . They had a little Bunsen burner back here and a watering can, . . . and they had these chunks of cherry flavored [licorice]. . . . I’d light the Bunsen burner underneath - it was on a stand, you know - and melt that, and add a little water and then go up and down the bench [ to sprinkle] the tobacco . . . with the watering can. Then fluff it all up again.” Then he weighed up so many ounces to a package. “It was a good job, it was fun,” Jackson reflected, but he did other things as well, since he was “like a handyman type guy that summer.” Since Jackson liked cherries, and since the tobacco was so redolent, he thought he’d sample the result of his labors. He set the watering can aside long enough for a taste. “I got sick as a dog and never chewed again in my life,” he laughed. Jackson’s wife, Phyllis, added that he never smoked either. Jackson’s father, who had begun his forty-two-year employment for the Demuths when he was just about his son’s age, eventually worked in the tobacco shop and oversaw operations in the mill. He came back to check up on his son every so often, but Christopher Demuth, who still ran the shop, rarely put in an appearance. The elder Jackson had begun there as a laborer, as one of many employees, most of whom were engaged in rolling cigars by hand. Standing in the silence of the second floor of the adjacent cigar building, Jackson remembered the two old men who still worked there during his summer: One of them had tacked up a color photograph of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only vestige of their outside interests. ‘They’d start, like seven in the morning, never said a word, wouldn’t talk,” Jackson recalled. “I don’t know what kept them from going insane. . . . The lady that worked downstairs - she used to gripe and growl about them. . . . And the one guy from Marietta, he was an amputee, [with] a leg off just a little below the knee, and he wore an artificial limb he’d use as a crutch. And somehow or other he’d take that crutch, you know, about halfway up the crutch, the crosspiece and support? He’d wedge his knee in there, . . . and propel himself along.” Jackson tried more than once to engage the old men in conversation: “They’d just look at me. . . . I know when the welcome mat isn’t out. I’d just go [back] downstairs. . . . You didn’t mess around too much. This was their domain.” On the third floor, Jackson was reminded of another story. His father “came up here one day and a man had hung himself on one of these posts here with a piece of wire. . . . I know I used to get an eerie feeling when I came up here.” There were benches then, where the tobacco leaves were sized for the cigar rolls. “We’d do this maybe one day a week and maybe take about six hours to do it.” It must have been stifling on that third floor. “It was ungodly hot,” Jackson remembered. “You could open those windows, but it didn’t make any difference, you were trapped. There was very little air and ventilation. . . . Maybe that’s why those two old guys didn’t talk too much. . . . The humidity was unbelievable, especially like in July or August, and there wasn’t any circulation.” From the distance of nearly half a century, Jackson regretted that he could not recall more about his summer job, but the Foundation was more than grateful for his first-hand account and its details that would otherwise be lost to time. Returning to the museum from the snuff mill, Richard Jackson spotted a familiar watering can lurking in a corner of the garden. It had been rejected during the recent inventory of artifacts in the Demuth Snuff Mill as having no connection with the tobacco manufactory. Richard Jackson knew better.