March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

“Best Cigar Made”> Bangor Cigar Manufacturing Co. turned out hand-rolled tubes of Havana tobacco

Walking about the upper floors of the State Street building, you can almost hear the voices bouncing off the brick walls or feel the oppression of summer heat that must have been commonplace with factory work.

Now, the silent rooms are cluttered with the stuff of the collectible trade — boxes of baseball cards, old Army surplus, and whatnot. Only fragments of evidence remain that this building was, quite some time ago, the home of Bangor Cigar Manufacturing Co. Then, when Bangor was a raw, teeming city, cigars were one of the area’s best-known products, and BCM, as it was called, reigned over the industry.

Go carefully up the narrow steps to the second floor of this thin building, where light fixtures, spaced about 10 feet apart, dangle from the ceiling. Three massive wooden cabinets, which probably held tobacco, now rest along the walls. An afternoon sun drifts down through the dust from a skylight over the center of the room.

On a white wood partition near the middle of the room, the names of the men who worked here, many of them Irish, are written in thick pencil above their metal coat hooks. Below one hook is a crude drawing of a cigar, strands of smoke rising. A crusted certificate from the U.S. Internal Revenue, with a fading date of November 1934, is affixed to a third-floor wall.

As the men would sit at their stations, hand rolling cigars by the hundreds, they would have been able to hear the bustle of traffic and other echoes of city life that passed through the windows at the far end of the room. A steady supply of Havana tobacco was carted up and down in a dumbwaiter. After trimming out the stems with a half-moon-shaped knife, the workers would stuff the silky tobacco into a tubelike mold to form the cigar’s filler. A few hours later, the filler was surrounded by a wrapper, probably made of tobacco nurtured under cheesecloth shades in Connecticut, and then sealed with a bit of paste.

The product was peddled downstairs in the storefront, where rows and rows of the medium-hued, 10-cent cigars lined glass cases. Nearby, the requisite wood Indian stood guard. Today, the cases house costume jewelry, sports memorabilia and other knicknacks for sale at Downeast Coins & Collectibles. According to owner Robert Slamin, every so often a BCM cigar box will find its way back to 26 State St., filled with odds and ends to be offered.

“No one knows what happened to the Indian,” said Karen Bragg of Hermon, a descendant of BCM founder Albert Lewis.

Cigars and cigar factories were fairly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Portland had a couple, and Lewiston had a small operation. Bangor apparently had more than its share, although no one knows why. By 1925, the half-dozen factories in the Bangor area produced 5 million cigars a year, nearly equal to the United States’ total current consumption. Bangor was a gritty town then, and the cigar trade rode the transition from horse and buggy to automobile.

Lewis, the grandfather of the local industry, started Bangor Cigar Manufacturing Co. in the late 1870s on lower Harlow Street. The trade name on the band, BCM, stood for both the company and its slogan, “Best Cigar Made,” which was drafted after a contest. Originally a husband-wife operation, by spring 1882, Lewis employed 10 men who had graduated from a three-year apprenticeship. That same year, Lewis issued an open call to local farmers to grow Havana tobacco.

Early in the new century, Lewis was well-established in the area and sold cigars by the hundreds. A March 1907 invoice, kept squirreled away in Slamin’s file cabinet, records that Lewis sold 500 cigars to one A.W. Chapin for $16. To cater to his well-heeled clients, Lewis also offered to produce private brands and custom-made cigars.

After Lewis’ death in 1908, control of the company transferred to his son-in-law, G. Rockwell Youngs, who became Maine’s first boxing commissioner. Eventually his son, Albert Lewis Youngs, would run the company as well and earn a reputation in the region as a professional magician.

About a decade after Lewis pioneered the local industry, he was followed by Walter S. Allen, an Oxford County native who owned a small factory at the corner of Main and Union. After 3 1/2 years, Allen moved to Lewiston to run a clothing shop with his brother, but returned to Bangor to open Bristol Cigars six months later. On Feb. 1, 1889, the first Bristol cigar was rolled at 197 Exchange St.

When the Great Fire of 1911 leveled the Exchange Street factory, Allen moved to more comfortable quarters at 50 Columbia St. With his original 4 Harlow St. building razed as well, Lewis rebuilt around the corner at 26 State.

Within a year after the fire, BCM and Bristol, and presumably the other factories as well, were operating at full speed. Cigars were on their way to becoming one of Bangor’s pillar industries.

By 1912, Allen’s 35 workers were producing 1 million cigars a year and selling them as far away as Des Moines, Iowa.

Cigars were hawked in front-page newspaper ads — “BRISTOL CIGAR/`Always Runs Even”‘ — and for a time were endorsed by Bangor’s aging former vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. In a 1913 Bangor Daily News ad, Lewis offers premiums for buying his tobacco products, everything from cameras to silverware.

“The answer to the question `how can I help Bangor industries to expand’ is — smoke the Bristol and the other Bangor-made cigars,” read a story in a 1923 Bangor Daily Commercial.

Handmade cigars, an inexpensive after-dinner treat for barons and blue-collars alike, had become the rage.

“After a while, all the advertisements were for handmades,” recalled Lewis Youngs’ 85-year-old widow, Alice.

Occasionally, she would treat herself to a cigar. “But not where anyone could see me,” said Alice, now living in Hermon.

In 1925, the area’s cigar manufacturers came up with the idea of “Bangor-Cigar Week” to further their cause. The Chamber of Commerce promptly endorsed the plan, as did Mayor Charles Crosby, who said the event would promote “one of the most widely known of Bangor products.”

The 1920s and ’30s were, perhaps, the zenith of the trade. Each of the half-dozen factories in the area employed support staff, plus at least 10 rollers, who would earn $35 or more each week doing piecemeal work.

“Thirty-five, 40 bucks a week was a lot of money in the Depression,” said Bob Drinkwater of Bangor, whose father worked first at Bristol and then at BCM when Bristol closed.

Inside the sweat room, tobacco would be steamed and then stretched on pulleys. When dry, the long leaves would be run through a shredder. Though sweet smelling going in, the steaming process left an acrid, ammonialike stench in the room. Drinkwater would choke and run for an open window as his father laughed.

In 1937, when George Splane began to sell machine-made cigars in Maine for a New Hampshire company, he and other salesmen would headquarter themselves in Bangor at the Penobscot Exchange Hotel or the Bangor House. A room was $1.50 a night, lunch was 35 cents, and dinner, taken downstairs on cloth-covered tables, would cost $1.25 or so. Based in Portland, Splane would travel the state in a six-wheel, 1937 Buick with enough room in the back for a load of cigars.

“And that car sold for eleven-hundred and 40 dollars, brand spanking new,” Splane said during a telephone interview from St. Augustine, Fla., where he retired.

Though competitive, the cigar manufacturers and dealers were friendly, Splane said. Benjamin F. Adams had a small operation next door to BCM on State Street, while Allen was a block or so away on Exchange. When Splane would hit town to sell his machine-made Dexter cigars to local grocery markets, he’d stop in to see his trade buddies. But, unlike them, Splane favored cigarettes.

“Of course when I went to make a call, I stuck a cigar in my face,” Splane, 86, said.

Like many goods, the production of hand-rolled cigars after World War II was largely overtaken by automation, which could turn them out by the millions. Machine-made cigars were cheaper, and they flooded grocery stores, mom-and-pops, and even Sears.

“You see, a machine could put out 5,000 a day, whereas a skilled operator would be hard put to put out 500 a day,” Splane said. “The industry just started to die, that was about it.”

For BCM, the end came in the early 1960s. Albert “Lew” Youngs, who had expanded his grandfather’s business with magic shows and one-armed bandits in the back of the store, died in December 1961.

Two years later, the family turned full time to the hearing-aid business, which had started on a few shelves in a corner of the cigar store. After nearly a century, another Bangor industry quietly faded into history.


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