J.c. Newman Cigar Co history

Ybor passed away in 1896 from an infected liver.

When shipments from Cuba became unavailable due to the Spanish-American War in 1898, many Floridian cigar manufacturers turned to domestic tobacco to make their cigars.

By 1900, the company boasted seventy-five cigar-makers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual sales.

Ybor Square (1901 N 13th St) and the “El Pasaje” building (1320 E 9th Ave.) are oft overlooked fixtures of Ybor City but at the height of Tampa’s cigar industry, these buildings represented the beating heart of Vicente Ybor’s industrial town.

Perfecto Garcia & Brothers was established in 1905 by Asturias – Oviedo.

The profits from Sanchez and Haya cigars were so immense that the company relocated to a three-story wood building on 17th Street in 1906.

Originally, the 13th Avenue building was constructed for Gonzalez-Mora & Co. in 1908 but became the rented home to dozens of cigar companies as smaller manufacturing firms were bought out and consolidated in the mid-20th Century.

In 1910, after a number of torcedores at the José Lovera Cigar Factory voted for the lector to read a novel with scandalous content (La Canalla by Émile Zola), dozens of female factory workers went on strike and a furious husband shot one of the torcedores in a crowded restaurant.

After temporarily using the Sanchez & Haya Co.’s Factory #1 (“La Flor de Sanchez y Haya”), the Garcia brothers built the 16th Street Perfecto Garcia Bros. factory in 1914.

By 1916, the company had rapidly expanded with the addition of two factories in Marion and Lorain, Ohio, and then employed a total of 700 employees.

By 1917, Annis accrued enough experience in the cigar industry as a salesman to start his own company, the Gradiaz-Annis Cigar Co.

In 1921, there was an attempted robbery of the E. Regensburg & Sons payroll as it traveled by car from the “El Reloj” factory.

At its zenith, the 17th Street Sanchez and Haya factory produced 500,000 cigars a day! In 1922, the original “Factory No.

The best lectors, such as newspaper editor and poet Ramón Valdespino, earned well over $100.00 per week. (For comparison, Stanford Newman earned about $20.00 a week when he started working for his father in the 1930’s.)

During the War Boom of 1945, the large tobacco trusts created an oligopoly over the critically important Connecticut Shadegrown wrapper tobacco.

The assembled business associates commissioned an oil painting of Julius which hangs in Drew Newman’s office today! In 1949, Julius would enjoy another anniversary in honor of his Judge Wright brand of cigars.

One particularly eventful interaction between Newman and Annis occurred in the early 1950’s as Newman returned home from a visit to tobacco farms in Cuba.

In 1951, the Regensburg company that built El Reloj went out of business.

Ian Fleming began writing the James Bond novel series in 1952 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica.

The Newman family moved to Tampa in 1954 and became the neighbors of the Gradiaz-Annis Cigar Co.

So, five months after the death of his father in 1958, Stanford purchased the internationally renowned Cuesta-Rey brand from Karl and Anch Cuesta.

Florida tobacco came to the company’s rescue a second time in the 1960’s.

In 1963, Gradiaz-Annis Cigar Co. merged with General Cigar Co.

In 1964, Bunny Annis passed away.

In Live and Let Die (1973), Moore’s Bond lights up a Montecristo No.

By 1977, no Floridian farms were growing tobacco for cigar manufacturing purposes.

Brosnan developed his palate for cigars while filming television shows in the late 1980’s and by the time he was enjoying the height of his Bond fame he was a regular at several prominent London cigar clubs.

The factory was sold again to United States Tobacco who abandoned it in 1982, relocating operations to modern factories in Pennsylvania.

He, along with his sons, Eric and Bobby, leveraged all of their personal assets and sat down with their family on Valentine’s Day 1986 to purchase their shares of the company.

African Cameroon Wrapper (ACW) tobacco became the wrapper of the Cuesta-Rey #95, J.C. Newman Cigar Co.’s flagship product until the 1990’s.

The Centennial anniversary year in 1995 was marked by success and celebration.

The World Is Not Enough (1999) opens with Bond being offered a Romeo y Julieta Churchill in a Bilbao bank.

In Die Another Day (2002), Bond visits a cigar factory in “Cuba” to gather intelligence.

In 2017, Eric’s son, Drew, became the first member of the fourth generation to join the business full-time as the company’s General Counsel.

by Holden Rasmussen | Jul 28, 2020 | Curator's Corner; Cigar City History by Holden Rasmussen