This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your

stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites.

And now joining us is Drew Newman, the great grandson of the founder of the oldest family-owned

premium cigar company in the United States to tell us the story of cigars in America.

Here's Drew with a story.

Most people don't realize that the United States has a rich cigar tradition that dates back to the

1600s.

The first crop of cigar tobacco was planted in the Virginia colony in 1612.

And at the time of our American independence, every colony grew tobacco. And many of our founding

fathers, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were tobacco farmers.

100 years ago, Tampa was the cigar capital of the world.

Tampa was known as Cigar City, and there were 150 large cigar factories,

just like ours here in Tampa, that made more than 500 million

cigars by hand each year, just in Tampa. To give you some comparison, today, there are

approximately 300 million premium handmade cigars sold in the United States each year that are made in Central America

and the Caribbean. But 100 years ago, one and a half times that amount was made just inside

the city limits of Tampa. But in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, many of these factories here

in Tampa closed. And one by one, they move

their production overseas to developing countries, primarily because the way we make cigars,

it's so labor intensive that the labor savings of having overseas productions really help them lower their cost and be more efficient.

And so one by one, we realized as the other factors were closing that suddenly, my family and I had the last cigar factory left in the Cigar City of Tampa.

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