The Ybor Cigar at Its Peak

At its peak, the cigar factories of Ybor City and neighboring West Tampa together employed roughly ten thousand cigar rollers working across two hundred factories, producing by some estimates up to half a billion cigars per year.

Vicente Martínez Ybor had arrived in Tampa in eighteen eighty-five, a Cuban cigar manufacturer fleeing labor unrest and political volatility in Key West, where the industry had previously been concentrated. He purchased land east of the city center, built housing for workers, and began construction of his first factory. Other manufacturers followed. Within a few years a district had grown around the factories: boarding houses, restaurants, social clubs, mutual aid societies, newspapers in Spanish, Italian, and English. The workforce was Cuban, Spanish, Italian, Afro-Cuban, and Bahamian, living in a polyglot community without American precedent.

The cigar itself was the anchor of everything. Tampa cigars were premium hand-rolled products using Cuban leaf tobacco, and they commanded prices in eastern cities that made the industry lucrative. Department stores in New York and Boston carried Tampa cigars as luxury goods. The cigar factories along Seventh Avenue were not assembly plants in the modern sense. They were workshop floors where skilled artisans performed a craft that took years to learn, producing individually shaped and bound cigars from tobacco they had been trained to read by touch, color, and smell.

The industry peaked sometime in the nineteen twenties and began a long decline. Mechanized cigar production at lower cost eroded the market for handmade premiums. Prohibition disrupted the social culture around cigar smoking in ways the industry never fully recovered from. The Depression hit Tampa's immigrant workers as it hit everyone. The nineteen thirty-one strike, which the workers lost, accelerated the decline. By the nineteen fifties, most of the factories were gone.

J.C. Newman Cigar Company, founded in eighteen ninety-five in Ohio and moved to Tampa in nineteen fifty-four, continues to operate in the original Regensburg factory building on Seventh Avenue. It is the last large-scale hand-rolling cigar factory remaining in the continental United States.