He came to Winston in 1874 with a plan and not much capital, sold his share of the family tobacco business in Virginia, and started manufacturing the next year. In 1913 he made the move that named a city: Camel cigarettes, packaged and sold at a time when most smokers still rolled their own. Winston-Salem became the Camel City, and it traces directly to him. Reynolds died in July 1918; his wife Katharine carried the family philanthropy forward. The work outlasted the man. Reynolds had donated to what became Winston-Salem State University, and decades later, in 1956, the family's giving brought Wake Forest University to town. Walk Fourth and Main and the company's reach is still legible — the 1929 Reynolds Building, the estate at Reynolda, the smokestacks of Bailey Power Plant rewired into a research quarter. The industry walked away. What it built stayed.
