Lorillard Tobacco Company

Lorillard Tobacco Company was an American tobacco company that marketed cigarettes under the brand names Newport, Maverick, Old Gold, Kent, True, Satin, and Max. The company had two operating segments: cigarettes and electronic cigarettes.

The company was purchased by Reynolds American, a company owned by British American Tobacco, in 2015, a deal that was announced in 2014.

The company was founded by Pierre Abraham Lorillard in 1760. In 1899, the American Tobacco Company organized a New Jersey corporation called the Continental Tobacco Company, which took a controlling interest in many small tobacco companies. By 1910, James Buchanan Duke controlled Lorillard and the American Tobacco Company, even though Lorillard kept its original name. In 1911, the U.S. Court of Appeals found the American Tobacco Company "in restraint of trade" and issued a Dissolution Decree to the American Tobacco Company, which forced Lorillard to become an independent company again. In the same year, Lorillard purchased the Murad brand.

In 1925, Lorillard underwent a significant transition after Benjamin Lloyd Belt became president. Having been with the company since 1911, Belt made some decisions that made the company profitable. He began to prioritize promoting the Old Gold brand instead of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, using such tactics as Old Gold on Broadway and sponsoring "Old Gold Presents Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra" which was a weekly hour-long show on Tuesdays nights over CBS from station WABC in New York. The Whiteman Hour had its first broadcast on February 5, 1929, and continued until May 6, 1930. When the Whiteman band went to Hollywood in mid-1929 to make the film King of Jazz, Old Gold leased a special eight-coach train to take Whiteman and his entourage to the West Coast. The train stopped at sixteen cities across the nation. Old Gold later sponsored Artie Shaw's Tuesday night "Melody and Madness" program on CBS Radio from November 20, 1938, until November 14, 1939. Belt was still president when he died in 1937.

Lorillard Tobacco Company opened a new cigarette plant on East Market Street in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1956, moving cigarette manufacturing from Jersey City, New Jersey and Richmond, Virginia.

Between 1952 and 1956, the Lorillard 'Kent Micronite' brand used a crocidolite asbestos filter, made by the Hollingsworth & Vose company, which later resulted in millions of dollars being paid to the relatives of their employees and customers who had died, or who were dying, of cancer.

Loews Corporation purchased Lorillard in 1968.^{[citation needed]}

Testifying under oath before Congress in 1994, Lorillard's CEO Andrew Tisch said that he did not believe that nicotine was addictive nor that cigarette smoking caused cancer.