Cigar History: Cigars were once one of Detroit's top industries

[El Presidente]

Cigars were once one of Detroit's top industries

 

Richard Bak  |  Special to the Free Press

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2022/03/13/detroit-cigar-industry-workers-women/9426965002/

 

“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. 

Another refashioned relic is the former San Telmo factory at 5716 Michigan Ave., whose thick century-old wooden floors now accommodate various clinics and offices. The Albert Kahn-designed building is where Theresa Koscielny, then a 14-year-old girl growing up on nearby Horatio Street, found employment in 1911. She was my grandmother.

Until her dying day 78 years later, Koscielny could vividly recall how she and other young women from her west-side neighborhood labored steadily at wooden tables inside the humid factory. Workers who placed tobacco leaves in bunches were known as “bunchers,” while those who shaped the tobacco into cigars were called “rollers.” 

Clouds of tobacco dust filled their nostrils and settled inside sinuses and lungs. Kidneys took a beating, as those paid piece rate resisted lavatory breaks for fear of losing several cigars. A day’s production for an experienced worker with nimble fingers was about 250 cigars.

Koscielny worked from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and a half-day on Saturday, the traditional payday. She recalled earning about $10 a week, most of which she turned over to her Polish immigrant parents.

“You were happy for the work,” she once said. “You could buy a pound of baloney then for a nickel.”

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.”

Free Press had its own cigar brand

Detroit’s emergence as a cigar-making center was a happy accident of timing and geography. The first small-scale operations started in the 1840s. When the Civil War cut off the supply of Southern tobacco, the city was in a position to take advantage of the rich tobacco leaves being grown across the Detroit River in southwestern Ontario. 

Newsboys in an 1890’s lithograph that advertises the Detroit Free Press cigar brand — Newsboy. A partially smoked stogie smolders near the boy on left with the Detroit Free Press bag. 

 

Rail and waterway connections helped move finished tobacco products — which also included snuff, cut plug (a sweetened form of chewing tobacco) and the more convenient and increasingly popular “cigar-ettes” — to points near and far. By the early 1880s, Detroit’s highly regarded tobacco was crossing oceans, appearing in stores in England and Hawaii.

Several cigar makers gained prominence and wealth. Tobacco moguls Merrill I. Mills and John J. Bagley, for example, served as Detroit mayor and Michigan governor, respectively, in the years following the Civil War. Daniel Scotten, creator of the popular Hiawatha brand, employed 1,200 people by the 1890s. He and his nephew Oren Scotten were multimillionaires at a time when most laborers earned only a few hundred dollars a year.

John J. Bagley served as Detroit's mayor and Michigan's 16th governor. He gained wealth and prominence in the tobacco industry.  

 

Ben-Hur and Miss Detroit were just two of the locally produced brands that sold by the tens of millions. Capitalizing on a famous name or newsworthy event was common. Local cigar makers launched a Ty Cobb brand as the Tigers chased the pennant in 1908 and a Spirit of St. Louis cigar after Detroit native (and nonsmoker) Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927.

Also found in ashtrays throughout the city were the private brands wholesalers made for politicians, hotels and such organizations as the Detroit Athletic Club. Even the Free Press had its own made-to-order line, manufactured by Brown Brothers and called Newsboy Cigars. An 1890s advertising poster published by Detroit’s Calvert Lithographic Company survives at the Library of Congress. It depicts a group of young Free Press paperboys playing cards and enjoying a smoke, the smoldering butt of a Newsboy nickel cigar on top of a crate being used as a table.

Buying the union label 

Assembling the typical cigar of filler, binder, and wrapper was labor-intensive and required deft fingers, which provided opportunities for unskilled immigrants, especially women. The workforce inside Detroit’s cigar factories was about 90% female, and they were overwhelmingly of Polish descent.

For decades, the city sidewalks were alive with hundreds of young women in long white aprons hurrying to work at Essex, Webster Eisenlohr, Mazur-Cressman, Bernard Schwartz and other plants.

A Detroit Free Press want ad from 1902.  

 

Automation arrived. By the 1930s, many factories had installed giant cigar-making machines. Four women worked each machine, including a “feeder” who fed it a constant supply of tobacco.

“You can always tell the cigar workers that are feeders because their faces are all marked from the tobacco dust,”  a Mazur-Cressman employee told a reporter. “You don’t stay pretty long if you work one of those machines.”

Nonetheless, the unwelcome advances of foremen remained a chronic problem. Those who resisted risked being fired.

The cigar bosses had always dismissed their female employees as docile. So they were stunned when workers, upset over wage cuts, speed-ups, unhealthy working conditions and sexual harassment, seized and shut down a succession of factories in February 1937. Soon, more than 2,000 women occupied five plants along Grandy Avenue in the Poletown neighborhood on the near east side. What followed were some of the longest and hardest-fought sit-down strikes of Detroit’s organized labor movement.

Company goons and the police forcibly removed sit-downers from one Poletown plant, though the strikers battled back by belting them with heavy wooden cigar molds while supporters hurled rocks and snowballs. The melee helped turn public opinion against the cigar makers. Eventually, the protection and support of the United Auto Workers and the intervention of Gov. Frank Murphy forced employers to recognize Cigar Workers Union Local 24.

By then, however, Detroit’s cigar industry was already in decline. Most smokers now preferred cigarettes. Companies fled the city in favor of the South, where labor was cheaper and unorganized. 

By 1956, the number of cigar makers in the city directory had dwindled to just three. Within another decade the last of them was stubbed out. Left behind were a few tangy scented workplaces and the occasional whiff of nostalgia over a now-vanished industry.

 

[riderpride]

Read a great article on this earlier:

Cheers

[Bigkahuna]

Very cool

[TroutBum]

Very cool, saw this a few months back semi related little blurb from a local paper in Marquette Michigan 

Marquette’s Last Cigar Maker

[Cigar Surgeon]

10 hours ago, El Presidente said:

The Albert Kahn-designed building is where Theresa Koscielny, then a 14-year-old girl growing up on nearby Horatio Street, found employment in 1911. She was my grandmother.

Until her dying day 78 years later, Koscielny could vividly recall how she and other young women from her west-side neighborhood labored steadily at wooden tables inside the humid factory. 

Clouds of tobacco dust filled their nostrils and settled inside sinuses and lungs

She lived to be 92 years old, dial it back a bit with the pearl clutching there Richard.