Colony was an unsuccessful attempt by The American Tobacco Company to add a filtered coupon cigarette to the specialty brand niche dominated by Raleigh, Kool, and Alpine. An illustration of a colonial tobacco farmer rolling his hogshead to market was used for the pack graphics. The few primitive rolling-roads available to the late 17th century Virginia and Maryland tidewater tobacco farmers damaged their tobacco when the wooden hogsheads had to be rolled any distance. Consequently, these early farmers chose to plant their tobacco near the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries where ocean going sailing ships could moor at plantation landings. Ships could navigate along the bay's 4600 miles of shoreline and far up the major rivers, so little overland movement was necessary. By the mid 1740's, tobacco planters along the James River and its tributaries had found that they could transport up to seven hogsheads downriver by lashing a platform between two Indian dugout canoes. These fifty to sixty foot long shallow draft tobacco canoes allowed growers in the Virginia Piedmont to safely transport their hogsheads to Richmond, a major tobacco port. Annapolis, Maryland was also a tobacco port, and early colony leaders there authorized the construction of four tobacco "rolling roads" leading into the city. Slaves, and later oxen, were used to pull the heavy hogsheads to market. Each hogshead held 400 to 500 pounds of tobacco leaf, about what a family with a small farm could produce each year.