Cigars were once one of Detroit's top industries

[El Presidente]

Great article 

 

Or, as the world had discovered, an excellent 5-cent cigar. At peak production just prior to World War I, Detroit’s army of stogie stuffers was cranking out more than 1 million cigars each day. That was enough to wrap the planet with a belt of 6-inch coronas laid end to end, with plenty left over to provision the city’s own population of “human smokestacks.”

 

 

 

 

Cigars were once one of Detroit's top industries

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Richard Bak  |  Special to the Free Press

12 hours ago

“Sometimes,” Sigmund Freud supposedly said, “a cigar is just a cigar.”

In Detroit at the turn of the last century, a cigar was much more than just a pungent wrapped-leaf tube of tobacco — it represented one of the city’s top five industries.

“Detroit leads the world in the manufacture of cigars that sell for five cents,” the Free Press declared in 1911, with precisely “256,271,559 cigars of all kinds,” the article continued, “being shipped to every nook and corner of the country” the previous year. Local boosters bragged of the city’s reputation for making the higher-quality 10-cent brands, enjoyed by discriminating smokers from coast to coast.

For all the puffing and puffery, there are very few traces left of Detroit’s once prominent cigar business. A handful of tobacco factories remain, their aromatic old spaces repurposed for 21st-century use. Among them are a couple of handsome six-story brick structures built in the late 1880s: the Globe Tobacco Building on East Fort Street, now housing the offices of various tech companies and small businesses, and the former Brown Brothers factory in Capitol Park, today the Lear Innovation and Design Center. 

 

 

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