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One
of the native plants that early Texas settlers found when they got
here was tobacco. Smoking cigarettes or a pipe was a custom if not
quite a habit with the native tribes they encountered, who gathered
tobacco wild and cultivated a little on the side in case they ran
out. Settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky brought their own blends
for personal consumption, and by 1850 Texans were growing almost 67,000
pounds of tobacco, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Montgomery County
had soils and a climate particularly suited for the crop and produced
a Sumatra-type tobacco, including one from the Abajo district of Cuba
that won first prize at the Colombian World's Expo in Chicago in 1893
and again at the World's Fair in Paris in 1900. Prisoners from the
Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville
supplied most of the labor.
Captain Thomas Wesley Smith, a Civil War Veteran and former Montgomery
County sheriff, founded the Willis Cigar Factory, the first brick
cigar company in the state and one of eight cigar manufacturers in
Willis in the 1890s. By 1895, 90 percent of the state's tobacco was
grown within five miles of Willis.
The Willis Cigar Factory and the tobacco farms of Montgomery County
flourished until the end of the Spanish-American
War. The end of U.S. tariffs on Cuban tobacco was the end of the
road for Texas tobacco as prices and demand plummeted and employees
at the factories demanded higher wages. Disgruntled workers occasionally
loaded gunpowder or caps into the cigars as a form of rebellion, an
act that later caught the fancy of everyday pranksters and comedians.
The building was abandoned by 1910 and burned into fine ash in 1930.
Researchers, however, were still intrigued with the Orangeburg soils
of East Texas that produced
such a high-quality cigar leaf, one that was on a par with the Cuban
varieties. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) set
up a demonstration farm at Nacogdoches
in the early 1900s, followed by tobacco packing houses at Nacogdoches
and Palestine.
But Texas never got the tobacco habit, nor were the Texas growers
very good at it.
"Impractical methods of handling and cultivation…brought about a decline
in production until the Bureau of Soils of the United States Department
of Agriculture revived and extended the growing of leaf tobacco in
1903," George McNess wrote in the Jan. 1944 edition of the Southwestern
Historical Quarterly. Besides, cotton was a lot less trouble to
grow and brought a higher price.
By the late 1980s nobody was growing tobacco or processing it in Texas
except for the H. W. Finck Cigar Company of San
Antonio. Finck produced special "private label" cigars for the
Travis Club, a private San Antonio men's club established in 1890
by William Henry Finck with $1,000 borrowed against a life insurance
policy.
The Travis Club cigar was a members-only smoke until World
War II when the club invited a number of young military officers
and trainees to join. They liked the cigars so much they demanded
that the company make them available to other military men's clubs.
Civilians found out about Travis Club cigars, and they wanted some
too. The business flourished.
Increased taxes and stepped-up FDA regulations forced the company
to close the manufacturing end of the business in 2014, after 121
years. Production moved to plants in Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic and Mexico, where the cigars are again hand-rolled as they
were in the beginning.
The Finck Cigar Company Distribution Company serves today as a distribution
center and warehouse for Finck's 60 or so brands. The image on the
label of the enduring Travis Club brand is of the original San Antonio
building, a homage to the brand's beginnings. |
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