Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1915 — Tobacco in America. [ARTICLE]

Tobacco in America.

Americans have always been pipe and cigar smokers. In the early days of the colonies cigars were imported, hut it is a safe assumption that the great bulk of cigars smoked by our colonial ancestors were homemade or home-rolled. Gentlemen made their cigars or had them made by their servants just as they generally distilled their own brandy from their own fruit. The cigar-making industry did not begin to be a factory industry until 1810, when the first American cigar factory was established in Connecticut, but the factory-made cigar flourished and by 1825 there were numerous small cigar factories in Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Maryland and Virginia. There was-then no internal revenue tax on cigars or other forms of prepared tobacco, the first internal revenue tax on domestic ctgars and other tobacco products being laid under the internal revenue law of 1862, which was, of course, a war revenue measure.