When aficionados, enthusiasts and weekend cigar smokers think of premium cigars and their history, Cuba is the country that first comes to mind. Seldom is the United States included in a discussion of cigar history except in the context of being the largest cigar consumer in the world. As the largest premium cigar market in the world, the United States is coveted by cigar makers from around the globe including those in Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. However, at one time the U.S. was also a leading producer of tobacco and premium cigars.
Large Philadelphia Cigar FactoryTobaccos from countries around the globe, including Cuba, the Philippines and Sumatra were shipped to U.S. shores and then dispersed throughout the country to as many as 250,000 cigar makers in places like Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and New York. These entrepreneurs combined imported tobacco with the varieties from Connecticut, Wisconsin, Florida and as far west as Washington to produce regional brands across the U.S. These were only a few of the cigar tobacco producing locations in the U.S. and by the mid to late 1800’s, tobacco had become one of the largest domestic cash crops of the day.
During the 1800’s cigars were manufactured in almost every state of the union by mostly small regional factories employing 1 to 6 people. 
Rippa Brothers Family Cigar ShopQuite often cigars were manufactured in the back of a house and sold out the front. But America’s fascination with the devil weed did not begin there and has roots deep in its origins as a people and a country.
Commercial tobacco production can be traced back as far as 1614 during the earliest colonization of what would become the United States. The new colony at Jamestown, in what is now Virginia, was a death camp of starving colonists with little hope of survival. Chartered by King James I in 1606, the Virginia Company led by Captain John Smith sought the discovery of gold and a water route to the Orient. Ill-suited for the rigors and hardships of early colonial life, the gentlemen pioneers were crushed by the realities of their task. The Indians were not on good terms with them; the London Company was tired of sending supplies to the colony; and their ranks of artisans, gentlemen and craftsman were decimated by disease and famine. As a settlement they faced the very real possibility of fading from history with hardly a whisper.
By 1609 there remained only 60 of the original 214 settlers. Captain Smith was barely holding the company together with his disciplined structure and occasional trade support with the Powhatan Indian tribe. John Rolfe, who married Pocahontas, had learned to smoke tobacco while in London and decided to take a shot at cultivating tobacco in Jamestown. But Rolfe decided against using the Nicotiana Rustica of the local Indians, instead choosing the coveted Nicotiana Tabacum strain then being grown in Trinidad and South America--though Spain had declared a penalty of death to anyone selling such seeds to a non-Spaniard.
In 1614, in what has been called by at least one historian, the most momentous event of the 17th century, the first shipment of Virginia tobacco was sold in London. Two years later, in June 1616, Rolfe and other leaders of the colony arrived in London to discuss the newly successful crop. Despite King James’ disapproval of the colony's dependence on a crop he despised, he realized that the very survival of his namesake colony could be at stake. And, of course, King James could not ignore the enormous import duties that Rolfes' Virginia tobacco, "Orinoco," brought to the royal treasury. Londoners and others around the world liked its taste and began demanding it. Since all sales had to be made through London, the English treasury grew with every transaction.
Tobacco became such a popular crop that a law had to be passed to force some food cultivation in the suddenly affluent colony. By 1619 Jamestown had exported 10 tons of tobacco to Europe and was on its way to becoming a successful colony. Over the next twenty years, Jamestown would export 750 tons of tobacco. Tobacco was the American colonies' chief export. The Jamestown colonists had not found gold, or a route to the South Seas, or the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, but they had found tobacco. Tobacco and the cash it created lifted the settlement from wretched failure to giddying success. Tobacco had created the need for labor at any price (even institutionalized slavery), and, since it wore out the soil every 4-7 years, the mad rush for land began all through the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay The entire area soon became known as "Tobacco Coast." Tobacco production continued to be a major industry and its influence spread all the way north to Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to say where exactly the cigar industry began in the U.S. but there are several geographic locations that are significant in its history. Most surprising among the manufacturing meccas of the 1800’s was Manhattan, which at one time boasted slightly less than 2000 cigar factories of which nearly 4% employed 100 or more people. 
Havana Cigar Shop Key WestBy contrast, around that same time in 1886, Florida had a mere 134 cigar factories. During the 1800’s tobacco production had spread as far north as Wisconsin which produced over 19 million pounds of mostly binder tobaccos at its height. Tobacco had become the primary cash crop for farmers from Pennsylvania to Florida. In 1880, tobacco taxes were reported to be one third of the national take with cigars providing 40% of those receipts.
Florida Cigar RollingThe manufacture of cigars was a hands-on labor intensive endeavor and the U.S. boasted the largest, most diverse and accessible population of rollers in the world. Entrepreneurs from Europe and the States provided capital to fuel the flow of tobacco from the Philippines, Asia, South America and, of course, Cuba to fuel the production of the finest cigars in the world. Cigar consumption in the U.S. was at its height in 1899 with an average consumption of 5 lbs. per person, making the U.S. the second heaviest (the Netherlands was top dog in this category) consumer on the globe.
Two reasons for the decline of the cigar industry beginning around this time are the proliferation of the machine roller and the rise of cigarettes. Driven by the availability of better tobacco, packaging and marketing, the now cheaper-to-produce cigarettes rapidly destroyed the market for premium cigars. Machine made cigars also became more popular during this time, but even though more affordable cigars were now accessible to the masses, the cigar industry could not overcome the creation of millions of cigarette smokers who returned from first World War I and later World War II after having been rationed a regular supply of cigarettes by the various armies. 
Hand rolling using the "Spanish" methodA single rolling machine could replace 6-10 trained cigar rollers and although we may not consider the product to be of equal quality, the reduction in price was crucial to the success of machine rolled cigars and cigarettes as the world fell in to what we now call The Great Depression.
The cigar industry never fully recovered from that transition and although today we enjoy some of the finest hand rolled cigars ever produced, our annual consumption of around 2 billion cigars at the turn of this century pales when compared to the approximately 8.5 billion cigars produced in 1912 in the U.S. alone. The next time you find yourself in a discussion of cigar history or the wonders of the Cuban cigar, don’t forget the role played by U.S. growers and manufacturers before Cuba was crowned the queen of the cigar world.
Sidebar:
Thanks to Tony Hyman for much of the information and inspiration for this article.
Tony Hyman at the National Cigar History Museum (cigarhistory.info) has spent a lifetime chronicling cigar history through the collection of memorabilia such as cigar boxes, labels and more importantly, documentation including journals and tax records. According to Mr. Hyman, “the domestic cigar industry is almost 250 years old, and is much larger than previously recorded, involving a quarter million cigar factories, hundreds of label printers, a thousand box factories, hundreds of thousands of salesmen and millions of wholesalers and retailers.” This is not exactly the view that most cigar consumers have of the past. Mr. Hyman further states with great conviction and plenty of proof “that cigars had more to do with the development of modern advertising and packaging than any other industry, creating more than 2 million brands of cigars in the process.” Visit Mr. Hyman’s self-supported web site (cigarhistory.info) to learn much more about the history of cigars.
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