Winston-Salem Tobacco Historic District

Winston-Salem's eastern downtown holds the largest surviving industrial section of a tobacco manufacturing center that once covered roughly ten square blocks. The district includes R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company factories and warehouses built mainly in the 1910s through 1930s, such as Factory 60 from 1923 and Factory 90 from 1926, along with the S. J. Nissen Building of 1894-95 and the Piedmont Leaf Tobacco Company buildings. It is regarded as important because it preserves the physical link between the tobacco factories and the African American commercial district that developed around them, a district much of which was lost to urban renewal from the late 1950s. Elevated railroad bridges, a creek emerging from beneath Patterson Avenue, and granite Durax pavement from about 1915 also record how goods moved through the area. The district's labor significance centers on the 1940s strikes at the Reynolds plant, led by Local 22 of the CIO-affiliated Tobacco Workers Organizing Committee.