In our ongoing effort to educate your mushy brains about cigar history, here’s something even I didn’t know until I recently ran across it-
read on about Ybor City: a piece of the big built up area of Tampa, Florida, which owes its start to three Spaniards who came to the US in the 19th century: Gavino Gutierrez, Vicente Martinez Ybor, and Ignacio Haya. Ybor immigrated to Cuba in 1832, at the age of fourteen. He worked as a clerk in a food store, then as a stogie salesman, and in 1853 he began his very own stogie factory in Havana. Labor issues, the heavy price list on Cuban cigars, and the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1868 caused Ybor to withdraw his plant and his employees to Key West, Florida. While his company there had been successful, work issues and the lack of an appropriate fresh water supply and transport system for distributing his cigars led him to consider moving his company to a new location.
Gavino Gutierrez came to the US from Spain in 1868. He settled in N.Y city, but he traveled often to Cuba, to Key West, and to the small city of Tampa, Florida, on the hunt for exotic fruits like mangoes and guavas. During a trip to Key West in 1884, he convinced Ybor, to go to Tampa to analyze its aptitude for stogie making. That very same year Henry Bradley Plant, an entrepreneur from Connecticut, had finished a rail line into Tampa and was in the act of reinforcing the port facility for his shipping lines. These methods of transport would make it easy to bring over tobacco from Cuba as well as distribute cigars. Now of course we can just buy tobacco online. Tampa also offered the warm, damp climate compulsory for cigar manufacturing, and a freshwater well.
After visiting Tampa in 1885, both Haya and Ybor were determined to build cigar factories in the area. Gutierrez surveyed an area 2 miles from Tampa, even drawing up a map to show where streets might run. Ybor bought 40 acres of land and started to create a factory. He continued to make cigars in Key West too until a fire hit his factory there in 1886. Later on Ybor spent all his time on the operations in the Tampa area.
In Ybor, most families made their money from stogie making, while the jobs of masses of other staff centered round the cigar trade. As an example, some employees created the unique wooden cigar boxes in which the cigars were shipped and which, in most American homes, came to be used for holding keepsakes. Other employees made cigar bands, which once were picked up by youngsters all over the land. Ybor city ultimately out-produced Havana. By 1900 Tampa’s Ybor city had become called the “Cigar Capital of the planet”. Ybor city kept on growing and prospering through the 1920s and into the 1930s.
 Written by Eric | Cigar Reviews and Related Topics www.tophatcigar.com  |
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