The Watchdog

Obituary: Marsh Wheeling Cigars 1840-2015

By Craig L. Barry · Originally published August 2016 · p. 10

Marsh Wheeling Company, the old time cigar maker, began in Wheeling, West Virginia as Mifflin Marsh & Son in 1840. The cigar maker is most notably remembered for the so-called “stogie.” The “stogie” became popular in 1827 when another Wheeling tobacconist named George W. Black first sold the distinctive cigars to wagon drivers on the National Road. “Stogies,” were much longer and thinner than the traditional cigar of today. They were named for the Conestoga wagon that many of the pioneers drove on the westward migration. Cigar making was a cottage industry in Wheeling until well after the Civil War. Mifflin Marsh began his business in 1840 at age 22 and was selling stogies to steamboat crews and passengers, as well as Conestoga drivers, at the price of four for a penny. After beginning production and sale from his home, Mifflin Marsh opened a factory first on Water Street and later on 12th Street between Water and Main in Wheeling (then Virginia).

Cigars were then traditionally rolled by hand, and a good roller could produce 1,000 “stogies” a day. In the mid-19th century, Wheeling was much more of a major city than it is today. For the sake of comparison, according to the 1860 Census, Wheeling (pop. 14,085) was larger in size than Atlanta, Georgia (pop 9,554). In 1908, the company opened the historic location at 905–915 Market Street. In 2001, the Wheeling plant was closed, and the company was bought by National Cigar, which moved production to Indiana. In October 2015, National Cigar shuttered their doors and ceased production entirely, a casualty of rising Federal excise taxes. Once a staple of living historians and widely sold at Civil War reenactments, it will not be long before Civil War battlefield sutlers also run out of their existing stock. This may also complicate matters for tinsmiths who have created the so-called “segar tins” specially designed to fit the Marsh Wheeling stogies. There are not many other cigars that currently share the modern stogie’s unique 7 inch x 34 ring gauge size and shape.

The reality is the modern Marsh Wheeling stogies have been machine made since the 1930s and although the brand provided what some of us believed is a “period cigar” doesn’t mean that’s entirely true. Excluding the question of how often most Civil War soldiers smoked cigars---the average prices for premium cigars were about 20 cents. To put that in perspective, an enlisted man made $13 a month; or about 43 cents per day. So a premium cigar would have cost half of a day’s wages, and that’s without tacking on the sutler’s premium for bringing those cigars to the army bivouacked in the field. Beyond cost, there also is the question of damageability once purchased. Where would an enlisted man carry his cigars? And so on, but allowing that there were cigars being smoked during the 1860s, what were they like during the U.S. Civil War-era and how were they different? In other words, is a stogie today the same as what was called a stogie 150 years ago? Robert K. Heimann noted in his article Tobacco and Americans (1960), that although Israel Putnam supposedly brought cigars back to American from the British campaign in Cuba in the 1760s, cigars did not start to become a well-known product until the beginning of the 19th century. Farmers in the Connecticut River Valley rolled them crudely, and those sold were long and thin. In 1810 one Connecticut grower imported a Cuban cigar roller to train local workers. Early New England “brown roll” cigars came in several styles, Paste cigars (which had the wrapper literally pasted on), Long Nines (pencil thin), short sizes, and supers (they were finished off with a twist). Cigars also began to be imported on a limited basis, through the main ports of New Orleans and New York, mostly New York. By the 1840s, the introduction of Cuban tobacco began to change the variety of cigars. By then, the types of cigars offered included “Twofers”, which were two for a penny, “all-American”, “Half Spanish” which cost a cent, and “Clear Havanas” which were supposed to be all-Cuban, but (just like today) caveat emptor…let the buyer beware! Cigars were also produced domestically. Antebellum American cigar production in the Connecticut River Valley began to take off, and by 1859 they were producing 9.3 million lbs of Broadleaf cigar tobacco. The Connecticut wrappers of the time were a reddish brown color with white specks called “cinnamon blotch.” This particular wrapper is not produced today or available in any fashion. These Connecticut cigars did not exceed a 42 to 44 ring gauge, were about five inches long, and the butt tapered to a point at the end. A look at any mid-19th-century cigar cutter will reveal a very small hole to accommodate that small tapered end. The rounded ends on today’s cigars are not correct for the Civil War era. In the 1860s, the three principal types of cigars were: the “cheroot”, which was a long, untapered roll of non-blended tobacco, usually imported from Mexico or South America, and very inexpensive; the “stogie” which was made famous by Marsh Wheeling but was almost a foot long, thin, and tapered at one end, sometimes sweetened with molasses so that it could chewed if you did not have a match; and the “segar” (cigar) which was generally the Connecticut version with the no longer available cinnamon blotch wrapper. Another point to consider is that antebellum cigar smoking was predominately (though not exclusively) a Northern phenomenon. Heimann describes the U.S. Civil War in tobacco terms as the war between the “northern cigar and the southern plug.” And there is an interesting reason for this description. Tobacco is a very unusual plant that is much greatly affected by the soil in which it is grown than other plants. For example, in the Colonial era when the Virginians were starting to grow tobacco, they found that peaty, black bottom soil produced mild, sweet Oronoco tobacco, and that sort of land became most sought-after, as it continues to be today. However, this sweet Oronoco Virginia tobacco is quite different in character that what was being used for cigar production. Earlier in the 20th century, some Cuban growers brought Virginia tobacco seeds to Cuba so they could diversify. In two years the plants grown from those Virginia seeds were producing a Cuban cigar leaf – in effect, the tobacco seed had adapted to the soil. Cigar tobacco can be grown in Connecticut, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, and a few other places, but cannot be grown in the Southern tobacco regions of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky or Tennessee. The only areas producing any cigar tobacco in America today are Connecticut, Pennsylvania, a little in Florida, and from one area in Georgia. In the final analysis, if you are concerned about the authenticity of your cigar, the disappearance of the Marsh Wheeling “stogie” is not much of setback. There are still handmade shapes and sizes available in most modern cigar shops that are much more period correct.