Pierre Abraham Lorillard

Pierre Abraham Lorillard (1742 – 1776) was a French-American tobacconist who founded the business which developed into the Lorillard Tobacco Company, which claimed to be the oldest tobacco firm in the United States and in the world. His name is also sometimes given as Peter Abraham Lorillard, Peter Lorillard and Pierre Lorillard I. Early life Pierre Abraham Lorillard was born in Montbéliard (France) in 1742, the son of Jean Lorillard (b. 1707) and Anne Catherine Rossel. He had five brothers, Jean George, George David, Charles Christophe, Jean Abraham, and Leopold Frederick, and a sister, Anne Marguerite. The naturalization recorded in New York on April 21, 1762, of 'Peter Louillard', a stocking weaver and French Protestant, is probably that of Lorillard. This followed the naturalization on October 27, 1760, of John George Lorillard, described as a French Protestant yeoman of New York City. Career Lorillard set out in business in about 1760 with a snuff-grinding factory in a rented house on Chatham Street, now Park Row, in Lower Manhattan. He was the first man to make snuff in North America. According to Maxwell Fox's The Lorillard Story (1947), Lorillard adopted the trademark of a Native American smoking a pipe, standing beside a hogshead of tobacco, which "later became the best known trademark in the world".