Since 2009, J.C. Newman Cigar Co. has been Tampa’s last operational cigar factory.
Recently, the 129-year-old business located inside Ybor City’s El Regensburg Cigar Factory learned they have an even more notable distinction.
They now run the last operational cigar factory in the nation.
Throughout the country, there still exist small operations, like the storefront businesses rolling cigars along Ybor’s Seventh Avenue.
“However, these are essentially tourist stops, a cigar retailer with a couple of rollers, very different from (ours), which rolls 60,000 cigars per day,” said Drew Newman, fourth-generation owner and general counsel of the company. “I find this rather sad. Cigars have been an integral part of the American economy since the first tobacco crop was planted in the Virginia Colony in 1612.”
He said the distinction comes with added pressure to keep the history of the cigar factory industry alive, which is why his family offers tours of their building at 2701 N. 16th St.
“There’s nowhere else in the country you can go to see this tradition that has been an important part of our country for hundreds of years,” he said.
And it’s why Newman has spearheaded a chamber of commerce of sorts for the owners of Tampa’s remaining 25 cigar factories, with the others being or already repurposed as office space, retail and housing.
Named the Cigar Manufacturers Association of Tampa after the organization that once represented the owners of the factories when they all still rolled cigars, its purpose today is to provide a network of restoration services to each of the building’s owners.
At the inaugural meeting last month, 15 of the buildings were represented, including the Lozano Cigar Factory, which is now home to the Lions Eye Institute, the Y. Pendas y Alvarez Cigar Factory, which is being converted into a winery, and the Bustillo Brothers & Diaz Cigar Factory, which will soon be student housing.
“Cigar factories here in Tampa are iconic, but they’re also really difficult buildings,” Newman said. “They’re old. They need lots of maintenance, lots of loving care. I want everyone to share their knowledge so we can all help each other preserve these beautiful buildings.”
At its peak in the 1920s, when it was known as the cigar capital of the world for rolling more per year than any other city, Tampa boasted over 200 operational factories, mostly in Ybor and West Tampa.
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| Yeny Hernandez tears apart tobacco leaves at J.C. Newman Cigar Co. on July 5, 2022, in Tampa. [ LAUREN WITTE | Times ] |
Julius C. Newman established his company in Cleveland in 1895. To be closer to Cuba, which back then could still ship tobacco to the United States, the family relocated the business to Tampa in 1954.
Nearly all of the city’s factories shuttered due to the Cuban embargo, the popularity of cigarettes and other economic factors. Most of the factory buildings were then lost to a mix of urban renewal, interstate construction and fires.
For decades, J.C. Newman Co. and Hav-a-Tampa were the final two factories rolling cigars in Tampa. But Hav-a-Tampa shut down their local production plant in 2009.
Since then, according to Newman, Finck Cigar Co. closed its Texas factory in 2014, National Cigar Co. shut down its Kentucky factory in 2015, FX Smith’s Sons shuttered its Pennsylvania factory in 2017 and Swisher International stopped rolling cigars at its Jacksonville factory in 2018.
Upon recently learning that Parodi/Avanti Cigar Co. moved rolling operations from a Pennsylvania factory to the Dominican Republic in 2022, Newman proclaimed his family’s factory as the last where cigars are still rolled in the country.
“It reaffirms what we’re trying to do, which is we’re still rolling cigars today, just like we did 100 years ago,” Newman said. “We want to keep that tradition alive for another 100 years in large part because if we don’t … there’s nobody else left to do it.”
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