Cigar History Destinations: Florida By Garson Smart At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Cigars have been with us for thousands of years - far too long for any historian, however dedicated, to trace. Tobacco may have grown on this planet (according to current speculation by paleontologists) for as long as eight thousand years, and archaeological data suggests it's been smoked for at least four thousand. Ancient pottery unearthed in present-day Guatemala shows us a man smoking tobacco through a tube made from dried leaves - AKA, a cigar, tenth-century style.

And of course it was this method of smoking tobacco that Europeans learned to use when they "discovered" tobacco. On October 28, 1492, two of Columbus's sailors were exploring the area now known as Cuba when they witnessed natives of the area inhaling tobacco in the same way as depicted on that Guatemalan jar - through a dried-leaf tube. In the natives' language, the smoked portions were called cohiba (now the name of a successful cigar brand) and the tube, tobacco. In misunderstanding sailors called the smokable plant itself tobacco, and thus an industry, a hobby, an entire culture was born.

With such an ancient lineage, the cigar has left its imprint on history - so it's no surprise that the attentive traveler, visiting parts of the southern United States and Central and South America, will discover all sorts of historic landmarks that have some connection to the history of tobacco farming and smoking on these shores. Here are some places that a reverent cigar smoker might decide to visit - if she or he wanted to see, firsthand, the ash-like traces that the cigar has left on the history of the United States.

In Florida, there's Key West - long a bastion of cigar culture. In its prime, the Key West cigar industry was among the largest in the world, with more cigar factories per capita than any other city. As with many centers of cigar production - Honduras and the Dominican Republic come to mind - this one owed its dominance, in part, to unfortunate conditions elsewhere. In the 1860s and 1870s, Cubans fled their native country to escape the civil war between Cuba and Spain, much as they would later flee (in the 1950s, '60s and '70s) to avoid the Castro regime, making other Latin American countries (Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras) into cigar powerhouses rivaling Cuba. In this case, what had been before 1868 a little town - no more than five hundred people - suddenly became a large city, and an important one, thanks to Cuban émigrés and their talents at cigar-making.

As with many booming industries during the nineteenth century, the factories had to build their own dwellings to contain all those who were working or wanted to work. Key West's cigar factories left bungalows all over the area, built with elevated porches (so the chickens that workers and their families raised had someplace to scratch) and durable wood, and these have survived long after cigar-making in the US went into decline. Nowadays the places sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly to artists and rich retirees with an eye for the quaint, the durable, and the historically important. And they're there to see, like any historically important property, for cigar lovers who feel like walking by.

While you're in the panhandle-shaped state, consider a visit to St. Augustine, one of the oldest European settlements in the nation - and the home of the Solla-Carcaba Cigar Factory, which belongs to the US National Register of Historic Places. You'll find the rugged brick building at 88 Riberia Street.

And finally, of course, you'll want to travel northeast of downtown Tampa to visit historic Ybor City. This neighborhood was built, beginning in the late 1880s, by the cigar companies - particularly namesake Vincente Martinez-Ybor, maker of the successful Cuban Prince of Wales brand cigar - and it provided a home to social experimentation that was nearly unexampled elsewhere in the United States at that time. Ybor took the idea of the company town - that depressing feature of late nineteenth-century capitalist life, in which everything, from homes to services, was owned by the company that employed the workers living there - and generously revised it: his vision was to have workers own their own homes, enjoying a more pleasant environment, helping each other. Workers and Ybor himself benefited, since the prospect of home ownership gave skilled tabaqueros a reason to stick around. And the neighborhood thus built still stands, long after the cigar factories fled - a popular tourist and nightclub district, and an officially recognized National Historic Landmark.

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