That 1909 article has been posted here a few times over the years, but it's always worth revisiting. It's quoted in Scot Reader's booklet "Inside T206", as quoted by me in this thread from 2016:
https://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=231087
In that post, I quoted Jefferson Burdick's observation from the 1939 United States Card Catalog: "Many old collectors remember the hey-days of 1890 and 1910 when collecting cigarette cards was an almost universal pastime. Prices in those days sometimes soared to 50c and $1.00 for a single badly wanted card. It was something like an auction sale where bidders in their eageness go to fantastic heights and the article is sold at many times its actual value."
See also this 1983 article about longtime collector John Wagner and his firsthand memories of collecting T206s when they first came out. It was this John Wagner who donated the T206 Honus Wagner which is now in the Burdick collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=207915
Rich Mueller wrote about the 1909 Charlotte Observer article and similar contemporary accounts of T206 in Sports Collectors Daily in 2009 and again in 2015:
https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...ll-card-mania/
https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...-1909-release/