Starting in a small chewing tobacco shop in the 1840's, Bagley built his Mayflower Tobacco Company into an ind ustry leader that competed against other Detroit tobacco brands like Hiawatha, American Eagle, Bijah's Joy, Prairie Rose, Silk Plush, Fearless and Honey Dew. Chew was the most popular form of tobacco in those days, but Detroit also produced cigars, as man y as 40,000,000 a year in the 1880's. Cigarettes were unknown until the late 1890's. Other sorts of manufacturing came online in the 1890's and early 1900's, but tobacco still ranked fourth in value among Detroit's manufactures as late as 1909.

Another Campus Martius landmark, the Bagley Fountain, is also named for John J. Bagley. While the fountain was a posthumous gift, the statue was "erected by a grateful citizenry" in 1897.

As Campus Martius was reworked in the 1920's to accomodate automobile traffic, the statue was moved and the grateful citizenry misplaced it. When contacted in June 1996, the Landscaping Division of the city's Recreation Department was surprised to learn that such a statue had ever existed. Later that summer, workers at the Detroit Institute of Arts, cleaning out a storage area, found an unmarked crate containing the statue. Offcials hope to restore it and place it once again in a public park.