In 1891, A. Cohn & Co. purchased 14,000 acres for tobacco cultivation and named the property Amsterdam, which at the time was the largest tobacco plantation in the world under one ownership. In 1907, seven of the larger growers and packers in the area merged to form the American Sumatra Tobacco Co., with a division in Amsterdam. Amsterdam became a company town with offices, a railroad, commissaries, a post office, packing houses, and employee houses, and at its peak had a population of 450. Imperial Tobacco Co. bought the American Sumatra Tobacco Co. in 1955 and operated it until 1965, when tobacco growing there was discontinued, and in 1967 the land was sold to the Coastal Lumber Company. Cigar wrapper tobacco grown under shade was produced only in a small area of Georgia, Florida, and the Connecticut River Valley from the 1840s to 1975. During the 1890s, wooden arbors began to be used to make the leaves lighter and thinner, and later cheese cloth tents filtered sunlight and kept insects out. After World War II, production was mechanized, but tobacco cultivation remained one of the most labor intensive crops, and with the extension of wage and hour to farm labor, costs rose to $7,000 per acre, making tobacco growing economically prohibitive and ending an era of nearly 150 years.