Texas' Tobacco Road. (original) (raw)

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.