While looking for an article for a contest, I came across some great information regarding the history of cigars. For your reading enjoyment I posted the first part of the 20 page article. If you would like to read the entire article it can be found here:
http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/tcrb...phs/9/m9_1.PDF
Cigars were one form of Native American tobacco use observed by
Columbus and early European settlers. A long, thick bundle of twisted
tobacco leaves wrapped in a dried palm or maize leaf was used by Native
Americans as a primitive cigar. Smoking of cigars is recorded on artifacts of
the Mayas of the Yucatan region of Mexico, and the Mayan verb “sikar,”
meaning to smoke, became the Spanish noun “cigarro.”
Among early English colonists of the 1600’s, tobacco was used
predominantly in the form of smokeless tobacco or smoked in pipes,
although tobacco was also smoked as cigars at this time. Records dating
from the late 1700’s suggest that most cigars were imported from the West
Indies and Cuba during the Colonial period.
The first U.S. cigar factory was established in Connecticut in 1810. Cigar
manufacturing spread to other parts of the U.S. as cigar use slowly gained in
popularity. Through the 1880’s and early 1900’s, cigars remained a popular
form of tobacco use, with most cigars made of locally grown tobacco and
marketed locally. By 1900, tobacco used in the form of cigars accounted for
2.0 of the 7.5 pounds of tobacco consumed per adult in the U.S., second only
to chewing tobacco’s 3.5 pounds per adult (USDA 1997, Burns et al 1997).
However, the amount of tobacco consumed as cigars declined as the
popularity of cigarettes increased around the time of World War I.
Tobacco used to manufacture cigars is different from that used in
cigarettes and other tobacco products. Tobacco contained in cigar filler,
binder and wrappers is predominantly air-cured tobacco in contrast to the
flue-cured tobacco common in cigarettes. Cigar tobacco is then aged and
subjected to a multi-step fermentation process that can last several months,
and this process is largely responsible for the flavor and aroma characteristic
of cigars. Small cigars on the U.S. market have straight bodies and weigh
between 1.3 and 2.5 grams each. Large cigars vary markedly in size and
shape, with the most common dimensions being 110-150 mm long and up to
17 mm in diameter, and they contain between 5 and 17 grams of tobacco
(Chapter 3). By contrast, the most popular brands of cigarettes are 85 mm
long and contain less than one gram of tobacco.
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