Allen & Ginter was a Richmond, Virginia, tobacco manufacturing company formed by John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter around 1880. The firm created and marketed the first cigarette cards for collecting and trading in the United States. Some of the notable cards in the series include baseball players Charles Comiskey, Cap Anson, and Jack Glasscock, as well as non-athletes like Buffalo Bill Cody. The company merged with four other tobacco manufacturers to form the American Tobacco Company in 1890. Since 2006, a revived version of the brand has been issued by Topps for a line of baseball cards. History Tobacco manufacturing The firm of Allen & Ginter, born around 1880, was the rebranding of John F. Allen & Company, a partnership formed about eight years earlier by John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter. When Allen retired in 1882, Ginter took on John Pope as his new partner but kept Allen's name. The first tobacco company to employ female labor, by 1886 they had 1,100 employees, predominantly girls, who rolled the cigarettes. Around 1876, the company offered a prize for the invention of a machine able to roll cigarettes (which until then had been hand-rolled). In 1880, James Albert Bonsack of Virginia invented a cigarette rolling machine. Because it was not completely reliable, all but one of the large tobacco manufacturers declined to buy the machine. James Buchanan Duke did buy this cigarette rolling machine in 1885 and used it to great success; by 1890 he had consolidated his four major competitors, including Allen & Ginter, and formed the American Tobacco Company. The "Allen & Ginter Company" was no more, but Lewis Ginter sat on the board of the American Tobacco Company. The cigarette brands of Allen & Ginter included Richmond Gems, Virginia Brights, Perfection, Dandies and Little Beauties. In 1890, Allen & Ginter, along with other companies of the United States (W. Duke & Sons, W.S. Kimball & Company, Kinney Tobacco, and Goodwin & Company) formed the American Tobacco Company, in an attempt to compete against British tobacco companies. Collectible cards In late 1880s, Allen & Ginter began to release cigarette card sets as promotional items for its cigarette brands. The most part of the collection consisted of illustrated cards, but there were a few collections of photographs. Topics varied from birds and wild animals to American Indian chiefs or flags of the world. Allen & Ginter's baseball cards were