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Samuel
Gawith - Snuff
manufacturer
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| FACTS |
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Tobacco
is a plant - nicotiana tabacum - that is grown and harvested,
then dried, cured and processed to produce a variety of tobacco
products. In their manufactured form, the tobacco leaves and
stems are transformed into products that deliver an extremely
powerful central nervous system stimulant or "upper"
called nicotine.
For
centuries, tobacco has been smoked through devices commonly
called cigarettes, cigars or pipes. It is also chewed, dipped
or sniffed in the form of chewing or spit tobacco and snuff.
in
1684, Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication for anyone
found taking snuff in church!
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The
Samuel Gawith Company grind and manufacture snuff, also known as
nasal snuff, from the raw materials of tobacco leaf and stalk, using
age old methods and machinery at their factory in Kendal.
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| Bottles |
The
history of the company begins with an enterprising Kendalian by
the name of Thomas Harrison who, aware of the popular interest and
associated commercial potential, of snuffs and tobaccos, went to
Glasgow to learn the trade of snuff making.
He
returned to Kendal in 1792 with not only knowledge of snuff making,
but with approximately 50 tons of second hand machinery, estimated
to be manufactured around 1750.
The
first factory was set up at a mill at Mealbank, on the river Mint,
a few miles North East of the centre of Kendal.
Although
this building disappeared about 50 years ago, some of the machinery
is still intact and in day-to-day use at the Brown House today.
A
family business
Over
the next 200 years the business of snuff making and the associated
tobacco trades passed through the family in various parnerships,
deals and inheritance until in 1920 new premises at Sandes Avenue,
Kendal were opened. The machinery was transferred from Meal Bank,
and adapted to be powered by electricity, rather than water.
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| Checking
the tobacco leaves |
Some
time in the early 1930s there was further expansion, and Samuel
Gawith took over the idyllically situated snuff mill of William
Nevinson at Eamont Bridge, immediately south of Penrith. This had
originally been a corn mill, then gunpowder mill, then from 1835
a snuff mill.
This
ran until about 1936-7 when, probably as a result of the change
from snuff taking to cigarette smoking immediately after the First
World War, operations at Samuel Gawith's were consolidated.
Eamont
Bridge and Sandes Avenue were closed and the Kendal Brown House
expanded.
For
at least its third time the original four-pestle mill was dismantled,
moved and re-instated. A tribute, indeed, to the undoubted craftsmanship
and ingenuity of it's constructors.
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