11. Cigars gradually replaced pipes and created a new tobacco industry in the 18th century
Sailors on the earliest voyages of exploration to the Americas observed the natives smoking tobacco rolled into tubes, held together by a large leaf wrapper. They adopted the habit, and it spread among the world’s ports. In 1762 Israel Putnam, later to be a hero of the American Revolution, returned to his native Connecticut after serving in the British Army briefly in Cuba. He brought with him Havana tobacco seeds, and a taste for the cigars he had acquired during his travels. Cigar factories were soon operating in Hartford, and tobacco grown from the Cuban seeds appeared in the Connecticut Valley, where it is still grown today, primarily for its use as cigar wrappers. Spanish trade with Havana led to cigars making their appearance in Spain about fifty years before they became popular in Connecticut.
By the 1820s, cigars were popular throughout Europe and the United States, displacing the pipe as the favored means of smoking tobacco. In Wheeling, Virginia, in 1840, Mifflin Marsh opened a cigar factory located along the Ohio River, which he named Marsh Wheeling. He produced a cigar he called the Marsh Wheeling Stogie. Rivermen plying the Ohio-Mississippi routes carried the cigars on their voyages, and the word stogie became a slang term for cigars throughout the Midwest and South. By the end of the antebellum period, cigars had become so popular that smoking lounges appeared on riverboats, smoking cars on trains, and smoking rooms in hotels and inns. All were the havens of men. The consumption of tobacco in any form by women was no longer considered socially acceptable. In Europe, cigars soon faced competition from yet another item designed to enable the inhaling of tobacco smoke.