America’s Oldest Family-Owned Premium Cigar Company, JC Newman

From the small towns to the big cities, we bring you the stories that matter. This is… this is… This is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Lee Habi.

The host of the Our American Stories podcast. Today, we bring you the story of America’s oldest family-owned premium cigar company, J. C. Newman. Also, we bring you the story of what life was like before the FDA. And finally, we’ll bring you a story from a busy mother of six who decided to befriend a retired cup. And we can’t wait to bring you these fantastic stories from our team. They work hard day and day out to give you the kind of untent that reflects a good and decent country. And on our show, the country is the Star, America is the Star, and the American people are the Star. And by the way, we’re are a nonprofit, so we’re looking for your support, and any bit will help. Do a little, do a lot, do your part. Go to the giving tab at OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation. Join our team in the work we do and become a part of all that’s going on here. We appreciate both one-time gifts and monthly gifts. It’s for you and through you that we tell the stories.

And now, Drew Newman brings us an amazing American Dreamers story of America’s oldest family-owned premium cigar company, J. C. Newman. Here’s Drew Newman, the great-grandson of the original founder of J. C. Newman Cigar. One of the things I really love about premian cigar is that they tend to bring people together. Today, we live in such a divisive world, with people having very strong feelings about lots of issues, and our country is pretty divided. But cigars, it seems, are one of the few things that bring people together.

It doesn’t matter your age, your race, your gender, the language you’re speaking, your income, your job, or anything. If you enjoy a cigar, we can sit down together, and we’re friends. And I’ve seen this play out time and time again, that cigars bring people together across different divides. It’s like a modern-day peace pipe. You strike up a match or light a lighter, and you light the cigar, and it’s lit. You can’t speed up the process, and in fact, the cigar slows you down. It forces you to take a break, to sit down, to think about life or whatever’s on your mind, to sit down and ask your neighbor what’s going on in his or her life, and to it allows you to form a connection with other people. And it’s a shared bonding experience that builds trust over generation. Cigars have been used as gifts, part of diplomatic negotiations to end wars, to bring peace together, and it’s a real privilege to be in this industry to continue this heritage. My name is Drew Newman, and I am the great-grandson of Julius Caesar Newman, who founded the J. C. Newman Cigar Company.

I think what makes us and our family and our company different is that we are a four-generation, one-hundred-twenty-five-year-old family business. When my great-grandfather started our company in eighteen ninety-five, there were forty-two thousand licensed cigar manufacturers in the United States, and of those, forty-two thousand were still the only one owned and operated by the founding family that’s still in business. My great-grandfather, Julius Caesar Newman, was born in a tiny village in eighteen seventy-five in rural Austria, Hungary, and he wrote that he was born in a house that was made out of brick, and it was the only house made out of brick in their tiny village. And on the first floor, the house was the local general store in tavern. And on the second floor is where my family lived, where he was born and where he grew up, and everyone called it the Brick House. And apparently, it was his beautiful rural setting, and they had cows and goats and chickens, and my great-grandfather up surrounded by nature. And when he came to America as an immigrant in eighteen eighty-eight and landed in Cleveland, Ohio, in the middle of the industrial age, it was noisy and dirty and crowded. He really missed the pastoral setting of his childhood. So, one of the earliest brands of cigars that he created was called Brick House, and he created it to reminisce, in honor, and remember the house that he grew up in in Austria, Hungary. And so, if you open a box of Brick House cigars that we still sell today and take a look at the inside label, you’ll see the house made out of brick. That was what my great-grandfather remembered about the house that he grew up in, which was the only brick house, and it’s surrounded by farm animals in this beautiful, lush countryside, because my great-grandfather was homesick for the old world, for the country he was born into.

When my great-grandfather, Julius Newman, came to America in eighteen eighty-eight, he was thirteen years old, and he didn’t speak English. He immigrated through the port of Baltimore, and he had to go through the immigration process, which included being interviewed by an immigrations officer, and he had his papers in his hand. And when he went up for the interview, the officer asked him, “What’s your middle name? You wrote here on your form your name is Julius Newman, but there’s a field for middle name in its blank.” My great-grandfather couldn’t respond because he couldn’t speak English. So, the immigration officer, perhaps out of amusement, decided, “Well, if your first name is Julius, I’m going to give you the middle name Caesar.” So, he wrote Caesar on the form, and from that day on, my great-grandfather was known as Julius Caesar Newman, which is why our company is called the J. C. Newman Cigar Company. But what makes that story even more interesting is that the immigration officer must not have been very well educated because he misspelled Caesar. Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, is C.A.E.S.A.R. But my great-grandfather’s middle name was C.A.E.S.E.R. So, we have this cigar that I created a few years ago called Diamond Crown Julius Caesar that has my great-grandfather dressed up as a Roman on the cigar band. But if you look on the band, the Caesar is spelled C.A.E.S.E.R. And hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t call or email and says, “Hey, you misspelled Caesar!” But the reality is Caesar is spelled correctly, because that’s how my great-grandfather’s middle name was spelled on his immigration form when he came to America in eighteen eighty-eight.

My great-grandfather lived the American dream. He came to the United States with his family in eighteen eighty-eight, not speaking English, not having any money, not really knowing how he wanted to spend his life. But he knew that coming to the United States, who would have the opportunity to build a life for himself and his family. So, with his mother and his father and his brothers and sisters, they happened to settle in Cleveland, Ohio, where others from their part of Austria-Hungary happened to be. And my great-grandfather learned how to recognize the words “help wanted” in English, even though he didn’t speak the language. And for reasons we don’t quite understand, he decided he wanted to become a cigar maker, and so he saw the science help wanted in the window of a little cigar shop in Cleveland, and he went in. And my great-great-grandmother haid the cigar maker to teach her son, my great-grandfather, how to become a cigar maker. And he started at the very bottom as an apprentice, sweeping the floors, getting coffee for the cigar workers, and learning the business from the ground up. And after a few years of this, he became a really good cigar maker. But there was a big recession in the United States in eighteen ninety-five, and people all over the country lost their jobs, including my great-grandfather. But by that time, he had a skill. He knew that he could use his two hands and roll tobacco and to cigars and sell them and be able to provide for his family. So, with the help of his mother, my great-great-grandmother, he got an order for five hundred cigars from the grocery store around the corner where my family shops, and he borrowed fifty dollars from other members of his family to buy some tobacco, to buy supplies and tools. He built a little table for himself in the barn behind the family house, and he rolled those first five hundred cigars and started his own company. And from those first five hundred cigars, from the very beginning of our company, now one hundred and twenty-five years or four generations later, my family and I are still working to continue the legacy of my great-grandfather and to keep our family’s cigar-making tradition alive.

Of our company’s one hundred and twenty-five years in business, at least a hundred of those have been what we call challenge years, years when business has been difficult, when we’ve had to struggle to survive and overcome challenges. The one that really jumps out in my mind is in nineteen sixty-one when the Cuban and Argo took effects. At that point, we were rolling cigars using almost entirely Cuban tobacco. In the sixties, Cuban tobacco was seen to be the best. It’s what consumers wanted, it’s what we knew, and it’s what everyone else was using here in the Cigar City of Tampa. And overnight, with a stroke of a pen, President Kennedy imposed the embargo that cut off our supply of tobacco, cut off the raw materials, threatened our entire business and the entire American cigar industry, and it was a huge challenge. Thankfully, we had a stockpile of Cuban tobacco that lasted about a year, so we had a little bit of time to figure out what to do, to test other tobaccos, to come up with a plan, and my grandfather was committed to making it work. My grandfather flew to France, where the French governments auctioned off tobacco’s grown Cameroon in West Africa every year, and my grandfather realized that Cameroon tobacco has a taste. It’s very similar to Cuban tobacco, and he decided to bring it to the United States and start rolling cigars with it. Using Cameroon tobacco, he was able to bring our company back from the brink of collapse and take it from a situation where we had a dwindling supply of raw materials to building the biggest premium cigar brand in the nineteen sixties called the Quest A Number Ninety-Five, made with African Cameroon rapper.

But the Cuban embargo is just one example of the challenges that we’ve faced. In two and sixteen, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to expand its regulatory authority over all tobacco products, and in doing so, they decided to treat every type of tobacco product like cigarettes. So, whether it is a handcrafted premium cigar, a pipe, an e-cigarette, a cigarillo, any type of product. It has tobacco in it. They’re going to, the government decided to regulate it like cigarettes. It’s been an enormous challenge for the premium cigar industry because we’re not like cigarettes. We don’t sell mass-market products that are made on machine that are standardized and homogenized and use chemicals and flavors and so forth. We make a all-natural product by hand in small batches, and so imposing this massive regulatory structure on our industry has been extraordinarily difficult for a couple of reasons. The cost of implementing these regulations can easily be spread out across a cigarette industry because they make billions and billions of cigarettes each year. When we’re making thousands of cigars per year, different types, and in quantities, it’s much harder to test all of them and to pay tens of thousands of dollars to test them, even though standards were testing cigars don’t yet exist. That doesn’t make sense, but that’s kind of, that’s the reflection of the situation right now, and so we’re stuck in this regulatory purgatory. FDA has said that they’re not worried about premium cigars because their own data show that children don’t smoke them and that our consumers enjoy premioum cigars. And frequently, however, we’ve been swept up into this regulatory mass and are subjected to the same requirements and restrictions as cigarettes. And so, since two thousand and sixteen, team, we’ve been working to educate FDA, our leaders in Congress, and in the White House about what a premium cigar is and what it’s not, and are working to ask a government just to recognize that premium cigars are different and to treat them differently. And so, I spent a lot of my time in Washington, D.C., just trying to educate folks about what our products are and how we make them, and who enjoys them, and how they’re just different from every other type of tobacco product. And I’m hopeful that in the end, we will get some relief, but if we don’t, it could be just catastrophic for our industry.

Premium cigars are a tiny subset of the tobacco industry in the United States. Premium cigars make up approximately one percent of the overall cigar industry and point one percent of the overall tobacco industry in America. We’re just a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of family businesses trying to keep the tradition of handcrafted premium cigars in America alive. We began offering tours of our cigar factory for the first time, and one of the things that really surprised me was that most of our visitors don’t smoke cigars; they don’t even light cigars. But what they do like is history and tradition and families. And what our visitors see when they come to our one-hundred-and-ten-year-old cigar factory here in Tampa is a four-generation family business, a handcraft that hasn’t changed in a hundred years. They get to see how cigars are rolled in person and can roll them themselves. They get to learn about the history of Tampa, of the cigar industry, of my family. And so, we’re really excited to welcome visitors into our factory here in the Cigar City of Tampa, so that they can see the American cigar-making tradition in person and learn about it.

So, the cigar that we roll here in the United States by hand is called The American. The American is an old cigar brand that was first made in the eighteen eighties in New York City, and when our El Relow factory here in Tampa opened in nineteen ten, it was the first brand of cigars made in this building when it opened. And so, as we were creating this all-American handmade cigar a few years ago, we thought what better name to give it than The American, which we roll here in our one-hundred-and-ten-year-old historic cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, using all-American tobaccos. And not only is each leaf aron in the United States, but every part of the package is made in America as well. Everything from the wood in the wood boxes, to the inks and the papers, and the cigar bands, the cigar labels, to the hinges on the boxes, to the cellophane tubes. All of it, from start to finish, is made here in the United States. But doing so is at an added cost. Labors more expensive, materials are more expensive, but we think it’s worth it to keep the American cigar-making tradition alive.

And a special thanks to Joey for producing the piece and for conducting the interview. And a special thanks also to Drew Newman, who’s the great-grandson of the founder of America’s oldest family-owned premi cigar company, J. C. Newman. By the way, if you’re ever in the Tampa area, be sure to visit the J. C. Newman Cigar factory. It’s a must-see if you’re in the area. And that means if you’re heading to Orlando, it’s not that far, or if you’re hitting the Gulf Coast for some beach time, head to the Tampa factory. It’s a great attraction for the family, and as the great-grandson said, this was the American dream lived with the great-grandfather did. And like so many family businesses, the next generation and the generation after it try to keep that American dream alive.