In the early 1900s, Ybor City was the cigar capital of the world. The port city’s subtropical weather and close proximity to Cuba made it an ideal hub for cigar manufacturing.
At its height, it is estimated that 10,000 cigar rollers worked in 200 cigar factories producing up to a half-billion hand rolled cigars a year.
Each cigar factory was designed in the same manner: a three-story building, 50 feet across and situated east to west to minimize damage from hurricanes and maximize sun exposure and circulation from breezes.
In 1910, when the Regensburg Cigar Factory, affectionately nicknamed El Reloj because of its clock tower, opened it was the world’s largest cigar factory in terms of square feet, designed to accommodate 1,000 cigar rollers who could roll more than 250,000 cigars a day or 60 million per year.
To honor the city’s cigar-making legacy, in 2020, owners converted 1,750 square feet of the factory, now the J.C. Newman Cigar Company, into a history museum that includes artifacts dating back to 1895.
Historic circa-1926 Tampa Theater exemplifies the towns past
The company began tours through the working factory, and the chimes from the restored clock tower ring out again over Ybor City. Owners converted 1,750 square feet of the J.C. Newman Cigar Company into a history museum.
The city itself was named after Spanish immigrant Vincent Martinez Ybor, who moved his cigar factory from Cuba to Florida in 1885.
By 1890, Ybor City’s population was around 6,000. Though many of the residents were Hispanic, immigrating from Spain or Spanish Cuba, there were also Italian, German, Romanian Jewish and Chinese immigrants in Ybor City.
Street front signage in downtown Ybor City honors the towns connection with Cuban cigar history
The incoming immigrants began transforming the swampy Tampa outpost into a trilingual, intercultural neighborhood.
The smell of freshly baked Cuban bread filled the streets in the morning; Italian, Jewish and Cuban social clubs popped up along the main avenue; and the sounds of Flamenco music drifted out of bars at night.
“Cigars built this city,” says Ybor City historic district ambassador Bob Alorda. “Parents would teach young children to roll cigars at kitchen tables because they wanted their kids to know the neighborhood trade.”
The J.C. Newman Cigar Company, founded in 1895 in Tampa, Florida is the oldest family-owned premium cigar maker in America.
Come along and join Bobby Newman at the family’s 110 year-old cigar factory in the heart of Ybor City.
Bobby shares fascinating insights about the Newman family’s 126-year history of making cigars and how to properly savor a stogie. The grandson of the founder Julius Caeser Newman, Bobby oversees the process of crafting premium cigars both by hand and with ancient hand-operated cigar machines. He also coordinates the partnership with the legendary Don Carlos and Arturo Fuente Cigar Company.
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