It is believed that tobacco began growing in Americas around 6000 BC. However, it was in 1 BC that native Indians started using tobacco in different ways like for religious and medicinal practices. It was believed to be a cure-all, and was used to dress wounds and as a pain killer especially chewing tobacco was believed to relieve toothache.

On October 15, 1492, Christopher Columbus was offered dried tobacco leaves as a gift from the American Indians, known as Arawak. He saw that these people smoking tobacco loosely rolled in a large tobacco leaf and some others he saw smoking tobacco through a pipe called Tobago.

Soon after, sailors brought tobacco back to Europe, and the plant was being grown all over Europe. It quickly became the main crop grown in the colonies and was so profitable that without it, historians agree, the English colonies in North America would have failed.

As tobacco farming expanded through the colonies, growers brought British prisoners and debtors to work the fields. These indentured servants earned their freedom after 5 to 12 years of labor. Growers soon found it more profitable to bring in African slaves, since they never had to be given their freedom. Slavery enabled growers to farm larger areas, making giant plantations possible.

After 1776 tobacco farming expanded from Virginia south to North Carolina and west as far as Missouri. In about 1864 an Ohio farmer happened upon a chlorophyll-deficient strain of tobacco called white burley, which became a main ingredient of American blended tobaccos. Cigarettes were invented in 1614 by beggars in Seville, Spain, a center for cigar production. The beggars collected scrap tobacco and rolled it in paper.

Cigarette popularity rose when British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War (1853-1856) found the cigarettes of their Turkish allies to be more convenient than pipes or cigars. Cigarettes grew in popularity in the United States after the Civil War (1861-1865) but were relatively expensive because they were hand-rolled.

Cigarette prices fell after American inventor James A. Bonsack patented a machine to roll cigarettes in 1880; the machines could produce more than 10,000 cigarettes in an hour. By 1919, cigarettes were more popular than cigars. Smoking continued to grow in popularity until the 1960s and 1970s, when awareness of its health risks grew.