Turning over a new leaf.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: A.C. Monk and Company Inc. - Company Profile

Tobacco road led the Monks to wealth and riches. How much farther will it take them as a public company?

In Pitt County, which grows more tobacco than any other county in the United States, lives a family for whom the leaf has truly been golden.

The Monks' tobacco connection goes back at least to 1906, when, according to a town history published in 1972, Albert Coy Monk was the first buyer at the fledgling Farmville Tobacco Market. Originally from Durham County, Monk and his brother, J.Y., processed, redried and stored the tobacco at a small plant on West Wilson Street, the first of several A.C. Monk Co. buildings spread around Farmville.

In the following decades, the Monks bought much of the tobacco grown in Pitt and surrounding counties, processed it into various grades and sizes, then sold it to manufacturers. They went about their work quietly from their home base in this town of 4,800, 15 miles west of Greenville. They supported Farmville Methodist Church and other community institutions and sent some of their sons to Woodberry Forest prep school in Virginia, then off to Duke, Carolina or the University of Virginia. All the while, they forged links with government tobacco monopolies across the globe.

"All my life -- and I'm 56 -- the Monks have been regarded by everybody as having applied their work ethic to the ultimate degree. They aren't playboys or slackers. They are hard workers and thoughtful people," says state Court of Appeals Judge Jack Lewis, a Farmville native. "And they are extraordinarily private people. I'm surprised you got anybody out there to talk about what they are doing."

During the three decades he ran the Farmville Enterprise, retired publisher James Hockaday says information about the Monks usually was in short supply: "You won't find much about them. They keep to themselves." In the local historical society's Chronicles of Pitt County, there are three pithy paragraphs about the family.

But in 1989, CEO Albert C. Monk III and his family concluded that a small, closely held company wouldn't work much longer. Once the domain of family enterprises centered in North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, the leaf industry in the past 20 years has become a capital-intensive, global business dominated by corporate giants. For the Monks, the clincher was the estate-planning needs of the three second-generation brothers, Albert Jr., Robert and William, who were in their 60s and 70s. Their sons, Albert III, 53, Robert Jr., 45, and William Jr., 28, are company officers.

"The vast majority of their wealth is tied up in this business, and there was no market for their shares," Albert Monk III says. His grandfather had diversified widely, buying farmland, a funeral home, an ice company and other businesses, most of which have been sold. "It doesn't matter what the stock is worth as long as there is no market for it."

To attract investors and remain competitive, the Monks decided the company needed to be much larger. With $243 million in sales in 1989, A.C. Monk Co. was a fifth the size of Richmond, Va.-based industry leader Universal Corp. and less than half the size of No. 2 Standard Commercial of Wilson and No. 3 Dibrell Brothers of Danville, Va. Each had gone public at least a decade earlier. A.C. Monk doubled in size in 1990, growing to more than $600 million in sales and a solid No. 4 in the industry, by acquiring the Austin Co., a Greeneville, Tenn.-based tobacco merchant.

Finally, last December, with the stock market ripe for initial offerings, the Monks spun off 23% of Monk-Austin Inc. to the public for $16.50 a share. The sale brought family members about $35 million and established a market value of $219 million for their remaining 72% stake. The three older brothers and their wives hold about 30%...