I had an elderly friend (now deceased) who grew up in Durham, NC, in the teens and twenties. He knew the Duke family.

He told me a fascinating story about how the Duke family gave some Union soldiers cigarettes when they were in North Carolina during the war. After the war was over, some of those soldiers wrote to the Dukes asking them to send more cigarettes. They were hooked, and the Dukes realized they had a big seller. According to my friend, it was the basis of their wealth and allowed them to expand into other areas. (Duke Power was founded by the same family, for example.)

Their company, American Tobacco, was also the target of some of the first big successful anti-monopoly actions by the federal government.