Eastside History Series: Cigar Boxes

by Dr. Susan Millar Williams

Growing up in Arkansas in the 1960s, I thought of cigar boxes as a real treasure, and I often begged the local drugstore to let me have their discards. Most of the ones I managed to get hold of were made from cardboard printed to resemble wood grain, and they had once held Roi-Tans, which sold for five cents each. Little did I know then that I would someday work in Charleston, right across the street from the building that once housed the American Tobacco factory, where those boxes (and the cigars they contained) were made.

One of the most famous brands associated with the factory was called the Cremo, and it gave the factory its local nickname, Cremo College. Roi-Tans and Cremos were marketed as more sanitary than other brands because they were made by machine and pre-drilled so that the smoker did not need to bite off the tips.

Most boxes were designed to double as counter displays, so that merchants could prop them open like this and sell the contents individually.

Both the cigars and their boxes were manufactured on site at the Charleston factory, the boxes at the end of the building now occupied by Garden and Gunmagazine. I ordered this one, which is made of cedar, on E-Bay. You can see the grain of the wood in this shot, along with the logo. 

The Revenue Act of 1864 required that all cigars be packed in boxes. On the back of my box is a revenue stamp that links it to the Charleston factory (on the right). 

These men (to the left) are posing in front of the Charleston factory not long after the turn of the century, along with huge cedar logs that were once used to make cigar boxes. The finest were made of Spanish cedar, though others were made of other woods, including poplar, sometimes with a thin veneer of cedar. Most were fastened together with small nails, and printed paper trim was pasted on.