KNIGHT’S TOBACCO FACTORY 612 Twelfth Street

This four-story brick building, constructed in the late 1850’s for the James V. Knight family, is one of Lynchburg’s last surviving antebellum tobacco factories. Before the Civil War nearly half of the city’s population was enslaved, and most of them toiled in dozens of factories like this one. Enslaved and free Black laborers of all ages worked in unsavory conditions to process raw tobacco leaves and manufacture “plugs” of chewing tobacco for buyers around the world. Their forced labor brought great wealth and fame to the Hill City.